Constructing My Personal "University" - Reflecting on What It Means to Be Educated and the State of Education
To Be a Truant
University didn’t work well for me. I’ve been enrolled at Brown for a total of three years now. Of these three years in which I was a student, I can’t say I’ve had a single good semester. If you’d asked me just a few months ago as to why I was so anti-institutional, I’d have given you a variety of reasons ranging from pedagogical critiques including my belief that the lecture system is outdated to more sociological critiques that attacked the culture of Ivy League Universities.
But being stuck at home due to the coronavirus with a lot of extra cash and free time inspired me to try an experiment - could I construct a better system of “educating myself” that would not only deliver an improved education but also cost a lot less than attending a private university? I picked a few topics that I wanted to learn and hired teachers to help me learn those topics. Over the past two months, I’ve worked through The Divine Comedy with an English professor, relearned the fundamentals of statistical physics with a physics doctorate, retooled my guitar playing technique with a guitar teacher, and learned how to hold a conversation in Spanish with two Spanish tutors. The results have been amazing and left me rethinking how I approach university and education in general. I’ve changed a number of my beliefs regarding what constitutes a good education and what the purpose of university is and have come to value the role of teachers and mentors in my life again. I was also forced to reflect on what went wrong in my educational career up until this point, tracing back the roots of my anti-institutional attitude to its creation in a poor middle school experience.
In this article, I talk about how I “set up my own university” as well as explore the questions of what is the point of going to college, what does it mean to learn something, what is intuition, and what will the role of university be now that the coronavirus pandemic has made common knowledge the actual value of university. I hope that you, the reader, will be able to understand my sentiments and be able to take away, if not some ideas for how to better improve your own education, then at least a desire to think critically about how you’re learning and whether or not your money is really buying you the education that’s been advertised.
What Did I Do? And Why?
I started working at a small healthcare startup as a software engineer in late March and found myself with some money. I had no idea what to do with it. Investing seemed like a bad idea since I was convinced that the coronavirus pandemic would change what principles people invested according to, so it seemed pointless to learn how to invest. I didn’t want to buy more shit. So I figured I’d indulge in a longstanding theory I’ve had that I could just hire tutors and get a better education for cheaper than if I had just gone to college. I started by hiring a Spanish tutor and a guitar teacher. This went on for some time and I decided to see where else I could put money in to improve my skills and knowledge. I’d heard about Harold Bloom’s Western Canon on a podcast with Tyler Cowen and decided that I’d try to read some literature since it’d change things up from the usual mathematics and computer science I was used to. Thus I began reading Dante’s Inferno. Within no time, I found that I had no idea what I was reading and needed a LOT of help. And so I started working with an English professor whom I contacted via Wyzant.com. I saw my reading comprehension improve drastically and began to understand the subtle historical and literary references that were initially lost on my numerically oriented mind. At the same time as I’d started reading Dante, I had been learning complex systems theory and found myself wanting to solidify my statistical mechanics knowledge so I could apply principles from this branch of physics to some of the models I’d been coding up. So I started reading Mehran Kardar’s Statistical Physics of Particles. When I found myself lost on the first chapter due to the difficulty of the book, I began working with a physics PhD who specializes in teaching to relearn the principles of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.
I had a rhythm going at this point:
Literature: Read two canti (chapters) of The Divine Comedy as well as the supplementary text, take notes on the historical and philosophical references, read another book for 30-45 minutes, continue writing or editing an essay. Then on Tuesdays, meet with the professor and discuss The Divine Comedy, in which we talk about the history and philosophy touched on in the sections I read as well as literary traditions and related texts.
Physics: Work through some sections of my thermodynamics and statistical physics book and try my hand at a few problems. If I managed to solve them, great! Else, I write down my questions and comments about where I’m stuck. Then on Wednesdays, I meet with my tutor to discuss.
Spanish: Work through some flashcards on Anki to learn Spanish words. On days where I’d scheduled to practice speaking, I had a lesson with one of my tutors. On the other days, I’d learn some amount of grammar and then try constructing sentences to practice the grammatical structures and then read a bit of Spanish.
Guitar: On Saturday’s, I had my guitar lessons. I’d get assigned some technique and musical pieces to practice during the week. Then on the other days, I’d practice for an hour and a half during which I’d focus on the finer points of technique, learn some new musical pieces, and then learn music theory. (I signed up for a separate course on music theory from Udemy).
Every Sunday I do a bit of a sanity check on my week and think about what I actually want to spend my time doing, how I’ve been using my time, and what I can improve about how I get things done. So on Sundays, I think about what big skills I’ve been focusing on and what goals I’m trying to accomplish with respect to each of the topics that I’m learning and then adjust my practice routine accordingly so I’m getting the most out of the time I spend. For example, when I started reading The Divine Comedy, my goal was just to understand the story since I was having a hard time following what was even going on. So my way of learning involved reading Comedy while having a Google Doc open on a separate computer and translating chunks of lines. Once I felt like I consistently understood the narrative, I started taking notes on the historical and philosophical statements made in the poem. I keep this level of attention to detail on each of the skills and have seen improvement at a more than linear pace as a result.
Here’s a picture of one entry from my daily journal for reference:
For reference, I hadn’t started studying statistical physics at this point and instead was learning dynamic network modeling. I also do some exercise every day and work.
How Has This Changed How I Learn?
This experiment has changed how I approach learning in terms of how I think about building skills, organizing knowledge, and approaching work.
In terms of pedagogy, I’ve started using the awareness and self-questioning techniques cultivated through meditation to find what I need to learn more effectively and understand my own emotions through the learning process. To start learning something, it’s important to first make practice a habit. But once you’ve formed a habit, you need to change up your practice routine otherwise you’ll quickly plateau. Thus you begin to zero in on specific skills that’ll get you closer to the goal you have in mind. This isn’t much different from what I did before, which I’ve written about in my ebook (if you want a copy, just email or message me). But the addition of mindfulness techniques has made the adjustments I make to the pedagogy sharper. Having teachers has also allowed me to get external feedback as to how I’m doing so I don’t bullshit myself about what I’m doing right and wrong. Having a teacher to talk through my thought process regarding my own learning has been valuable since I can more easily see how I’m fooling myself and construct a better practice routine. A teacher also knows a much better roadmap to my goals than I do myself.
Teachers also allow me to ask broader questions than what I would learn on my own. If I’m reading Inferno and I start noticing a certain thematic pattern, the best resource I would have on my own is the internet, which is unlikely to give me the answers I want. But having a teacher allows me to ask questions about these broader themes, and since they’re more knowledgeable, I’d get answers as well as more questions and topics to think about related to my trains of thought. It’s also satisfying to get pointed to topics that may be tangentially related to whatever I’m learning that spark interest for something I could study in the future. Working with a teacher also makes me better at asking questions, which is an underrated skill. Asking “dumb” questions has been important since it helps ground my intuition better (for example, I asked my statistical physics teacher what exactly temperature was a month into learning the topic… which is something I should’ve internalized within the first week of studying the subject). For other questions, talking through my trains of thought with a teacher helps pinpoint conceptual gaps I may have and also illustrates the differences between my own intuition for the subject and my teacher’s intuition.
On the topic of intuition, I believe this experiment has helped me understand what exactly it is (a bit better than before). Intuition is an idea tossed around frequently in mathematical circles. We end up believing it to be something that is largely innate, that some people are born with and some people are born without. This notion is reflected in the broader culture as well. In school, some people just “get” math and some don’t. But I believe this is nonsense. I believe that intuition is something that can be built with a teacher who pays close attention to the ways you think and is able to communicate their understanding of a concept to you in a way that fits your current information schematic. Public schools rarely offer this though. Between teachers who are not interested in actually teaching and underfunded classrooms that have too many students, rarely do students get the individual attention that they need to succeed. It’s disheartening because I believe every person draws from the same “pool of intuition” in a sense, it’s just that we all have different amounts of prior knowledge and exposure to material that results in different abilities to pick up a concept. With this “pool of intuition” being innate, I’ve come to believe that it’s some sort of pre-verbal understanding of the underlying structure of some piece of knowledge within a broader graph of knowledge. This idea deserves its own separate blog post, but the moral of the story is that good teachers are important for helping students build intuition.
The results of this experiment have found their way into my work as well. I’m more focused on my skill as a software engineer and the specific skills that I need to learn to improve. The pedagogical approach to learning has led me to take each task from my job and dissect the specific skills that I should be picking up and making note of them in my journal. This focus on skills and pedagogy has allowed me to go from struggling at Javascript to becoming “okay” at it (nobody ever really gets good at Javascript) as well as thinking about software on a broader systems level. I also ask for help more. This is still difficult for me since I’m working through insecurities regarding my programming ability and appearing stupid in front coworkers, but it’s been beneficial to ask others for help since I can get an understanding of the intuition that they use when it comes to writing code and designing good systems. It also speeds up the learning process for me since I tighten up the feedback loop between mistakes and improvement.
For example, I started creating flowcharts to develop more intuition about software in terms of systems
With all of these benefits that I’ve listed above, it makes sense to ask why it took me so long to realize the benefits of having teachers in my life. I’ve changed my mind on a lot of things. I went from believing I can learn everything on my own and not needing anybody to being willing to ask for help and believing other people have valuable insights to teach me. My anti-institutional attitudes developed during my time in public school. I had a bad time in middle and high school both in an academic sense, since I was always bored in class and dealt with an administration that explicitly tried to hold me back from taking harder classes, as well as a social sense, since I had a hard time fitting in with my peers for a variety of reasons. By my final year of high school, I’d convinced the administration to let me take half of my classes from universities instead of the school and created my own “internship” programming an Android app so I could get out of school for the last few months. During this time, it had become clear to me that learning on my own was better than going through classes in public school. I hoped that college would provide better education, but when I enrolled at Brown in the fall I found the teaching to be lacking and doubled down on my anti-institutional attitudes, adopting a philosophy that college is absolutely useless and people should skip classes and read books/work on projects instead. But I think I was wrong. I think if I’d tried to develop good relationships with my professors, I would have appreciated university a bit more and would have gotten more out of my education. I think I developed a bit of an ego that was really a defense mechanism to compensate for feeling let down and held back throughout public school. In any case, I’m happy to have processed some of the attachments I’d developed during grade school and change my views since it’s led me to an improved and more nuanced position on education.
What About University?
University still sucks, and I’m more convinced about many of the negative opinions that I’d held from before. However, I’m less inclined to throw it out completely as a model of education now and am more interested in taking the good parts and proposing a better solution. The rise of MOOCs (massively open online courses) and online education makes this an opportune chance to make observations of what education is really about.
Many of the issues with university are pedagogical. While colleges market and narrativize themselves as the foremost places of getting an education, the reality is that they fail miserably in this task. One of the largest critiques that can be levied against universities is poor teaching. You’ll never read about it on a brochure for an Ivy League school but many professors treat teaching as a necessary evil to doing research at a university. This attitude varies among departments, and in my experience is the worst in math departments. Another issue is that the actual quality of teaching irrespective of the professor’s attitudes can be poor. This means lacking communication skills and not knowing how to give feedback to students. Moving on from the teaching quality itself, lectures are an outdated means of teaching. Large anonymous lectures don’t facilitate the development of intuition and make it hard to personalize teaching styles for students. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if students weren’t forced to pay an amount that would allow them to just hire a tutor with good communication skills and intuition and get a more personalized education. Most universities hold office hours for these larger classes and have TA’s to compensate, but this solution isn’t thorough since it’s too easy to just torture the TA’s for answers to problem sets and projects and fake success. Another option is to fall through the cracks. Luckily seminar classes do exist and allow for more student-instructor communication, but even then I’m skeptical that the teaching quality would be as good as just working one on one with a tutor.
With this in mind, what is university actually for? I believe, more than anything else, it’s a signal one knows how to follow rules and fit into an institution. Getting a college degree doesn’t tell employers that you know how to think deeply or reason about complex ideas, but it does tell employers that you’re conditioned to work in a corporation since you know how to jump through hoops and follow hierarchical structures. I don’t believe this is necessarily a bad thing, but the danger comes from cultural representations of university misaligning with this reality. University is culturally represented as a place to party for four years and then get a job, but this diffuse nihilism never finds its way onto a college brochure. Instead, universities boast about their quality of education and what it means to be a (fill in the blank) student, weaving a romantic narrative not matching reality. Of course, employability is still mentioned but it’s all packaged under some notion of erudition and education. There are too many conflicting narratives about college that obfuscate the Reality of what’s going on.
The coronavirus pandemic shutting down American universities made the reality that universities sell signaling mechanisms and experiences rather than actual education common knowledge. Zoom university failed miserably, with students complaining that they’re paying the same amount of tuition for a full private college experience for the equivalent of a MOOC (massively online open course) with a bit more personalized feedback. Many refuse to go back to school in the fall if Zoom university continues. Combined with the closure of many lower-ranked universities and the crony actions taken by higher-ranked universities, the narrative of the university as a place of high education and erudition is beginning to crumble. The question is, what takes its place?
Top tier universities will probably survive and will focus much more on their branding ability in a desperate attempt to follow the ontology that they previously held. I also think that top tier universities will survive in teaching subjects that cannot be easily taught online, such as abstract math or physics. But I believe online courses will replace the void left by mid and low tier universities that focused primarily on developing students’ skills as opposed to delivering a deep education. MOOCs can easily deliver effective education for many topics such as business or computer science. This is shown through the rise of business models such as Lambda School as well as online MBA degrees. MOOC technology is still nascent and has much room for development, so we can expect to see improvement in the experience over the coming decade to the point where MOOCs rival the educational experience provided by a university. This shift will be important in that it democratizes education. Top tier universities that advertise a narrative of equal access and opportunity but realistically work in such a way that students from middle to upper-class backgrounds have an easier time getting in will no longer have a monopoly on the word “education”.
What can we do as individuals to make the best of these changes? It’s clear that MOOCs allow us to build key skills, but the shortage of one on one interaction with an expert makes it harder to develop intuition. At the same time, we don’t want to go to university to take advantage of this kind of tutelage since we’re getting ripped off. I propose a hybrid model that empowers learners to learn what they want and develop intuition while maintaining affordability. This involves being crystal clear about your goals as a learner and using freely available resources online while working with a tutor to develop the best roadmap for you to accomplish your goals and develop intuition and creative skills. MOOCs remain useful due to their affordability, but we can pair MOOCs with a teacher who we trust and have developed a relationship with so that we can get more depth in our education and go beyond merely learning skills. As for university, I say they should revert to being research institutions but are more affordable. Fire the crony management and the administrators who drive up the costs of university and bring universities back to their original intention of delivering erudition and an actual education as opposed to a simulation of one and a golden ticket into McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. But I believe this will take a long time, and the transition will not be pretty. In the meantime, we can all be more aware of what we’re getting out of university and demand something better.