A Different Road To Work, Bypassing College Dreams
HN has a subtle anti-college bias, so I want to put my point out there: my college experience was not defined by my classes or by my professors, but by the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker. In addition, being a part of an institution makes it much easier to find out about and get access to lines of research and thinking I normally wouldn't have thought about. I entered as a kid who wanted to design chips, and I left an amateur computational linguistics researcher (emphasis on the amateur). This was something I 'fell into,' not something I sought out.<p>Also, if you discover something and want to find out more, emailing the person who worked on it is a great start. If this person happens to be part of your institution, you have a 'free pass' to just email them. Compare to if you were just someone off the street: you have to work harder to get a response. It's a little silly, but a very real effect -- once you're "in" people will be more open to you about their work.<p>This doesn't mean you can't do any of these things if you choose not to go to college, but if you're making that decision then you should know that the experience is more than just 'expensive and ineffective vocational training.'