§ Kaiwen Wang
January 2024 (7 months ago)

College goals and what matters

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10 min read (1814 words)
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Underrecognized Important Features in a College

  • Location
    • Proximity to certain job industries
      • What happens is that companies recruit from a college based on perceived reputation (“hey, this school seems highly ranked, let’s go visit there”) which is a middleman cost (colleges charge thousands for recruiters to attend career fairs, which they’d rather not pay) or if there’s someone in a firm who thinks highly of their alma mater. Barring those two, firms just go to schools that are nearby. For Georgia Tech, that’s Delta Airlines, Home Depot, NCR, and to a lesser extent UPS and Coca-Cola (I haven’t seen them around career fairs that much).
      • Know what the reputation of a city is. New York for finance, DC for policy, Boston for biotech, and so on.
    • City infrastructure, demographics, and weather
      • Demographically speaking, my impression is that schools like UW, Waterloo, UBC, and Toronto are more East Asian or immigrant schools which significantly affects the school culture, which will be significantly different from UC schools, which themselves are different from Texas schools, midwestern schools, northeastern schools, or southeastern schools.
      • The most common trip you’ll be making is that from the airport to the school. At Michigan, there’s a 30 minute shuttle to Detroit. There’s an Atlanta subway from the airport, but it isn’t safe or nice.
      • There is an influence of the city even if your college is good (Rice in Houston doesn’t have many interesting things around it despite the quality of school). You get a lot more exposure to global brands and global people in other cities. Atlanta is OK—not a flyover town, but also not Washington DC.
    • Campus size
  • Supermarkets nearby/quality of dining halls
    • Seriously underrated. College is a time where students are working hard on their projects, learning, meeting people, and so on. Oftentimes, student health suffers due to poor quality/expensive dining halls combined with the impossibility of creating good logistics when students are constantly moving around for internships or other programs.
  • Undergraduate student population
    • Number of students increase linearly and number of potential connections increases quadratically. Most ivies have undergrad population around 3-4k, which is a large enough size to sort of know everyone.
    • If you’re in a lecture hall, you might have 0 friends because nobody has the opportunity to speak or present themselves in a way that would attract like-minded people. In a group of 20-30, the dedicated will sort themselves out. Network value is often built unintentionally by repeated interactions.
  • Public vs. Private college
    • Student demographics (state vs. national and international), quality of services, amount of students, sense of community
  • Practicioners vs Instructors
    • There are professors that will teach you “things” from a curriculum and professors who actually are in their industry and can provide connections and conferences. You want more of the former compared to the latter. A dedicated student would have to be really serious about what they want to do and to actually comprehend what different professors are like. It’s a type of research done over months in an analyst role. I don’t think most college students actually do this; they just go by perceived reputation of a school.
  • Amount of international students
    • This is a good sign, as long as it’s not a degree mill. They’re investing so much to come to a new country, so the school better be worth it. In a state school, everyone is from a similar area, so people don’t have as many unique perspectives to contribute. They’re probably less independent (staying closer to home) and less driven as a rule of thumb.

The Endgame

The signal of youth I’ve noticed (18-20 year olds) is the conviction by which they hold their opinions. As people get older, they get more unsure (if they’re more accurate, they will perceive the 18-20 year olds as having unfounded opinions. If they’re unaccurate, they’re going to become conservative and actually behind how society changes).

There have been countless times where I’ve heard “we just need European-style healthcare,” or that certain systems need to be fixed without understanding the deep nuances. Furthermore, young people don’t have a theory of mind of other people: they can’t see things from another person’s perspective easily.

There’s a significant academic game played in the top schools of the country: around places like Thomas Jefferson High School, Bronx Science, New Jersey, and so on. Students take a huge amount of APs, there’s a competitive grind for things, and

I was and still will be an extremely competitive person. I probably would’ve contributed to the academic rat race wherever I went, especially when I was younger.

So suppose someone wins: they take all the hard AP classes, they get into a T10 college, they get the top internships, and they end up working at some combination of tech, finance, consulting, quant, or something that makes a ton of money. Is that winning? It’s the end journey for a lot of these people.

Two Tiers

There are two tiers of people I’ve noticed in society. The first are “real people” actually dedicated to getting good at their industry: they’re silent on LinkedIn, they don’t present themselves in a certain way, they’re insightful and capable of deep thought, but aren’t afraid to have fun. These people can recognize each other immediately. The second are “funny people” clownposting on LinkedIn, unserious when you meet them and love joking/laughing, repeat poorly backed opinions, constantly watch movies and aren’t ruthless with their time, yet they think that they are the first type. Unfortunately, these people are much more numerous.

People should be very careful to decide what sort of image they put forth. The actions of funny people are often a repellant to the first.

The most important things that should actually be taught

  • Understanding things from another person’s perspective
    • Seeing what another person is actually like based on the vocabulary they use and their behavior
    • What the incentives, motivations, and values of other people are (whether for good or bad)
  • A general explanation of different structures/groups of people in society and how they work
    • How the economy works
    • How credit cards work
    • What is money and what is wealth
  • How to search for information, interpret quality, and perceive things at a certain level (as some call it, “taste”)
  • Reading good books
  • How to have a good digital setup
    • How to interpret good information
  • How to build persistence, dedication, and grit
  • How to interpret second, third, or nth order effects
  • Understanding what you as an individual actually value and your natural tendencies

The Purpose of College

To create an association between you and a group of people that provides a source of income and meaning.

Generally, the income part comes before meaning because income is necessary to survive. By “group of people,” I mean that people usually work in teams in society. Generally, most people aren’t good enough to join a specific technical team, so they get recruited by companies based on general competence and do team matching. For more general jobs, it’s generally someone you know that pulls you into a group. The experience at a company can be completely different based on the immediate people around you.

If someone’s sense of direction is “do as well in school as possible,” they’ll excel in all their classes, do well in hobbies, make friends, end up at a good firm, pretty much because if you do those things it increases the probability of success. But lots of people graduate college with 4.0s and no next direction to go, so they might get a Master’s. Or a PhD. Just because it’s right in front of them. Lots of high skilled people in society aren’t placed in firms that make the best of their skill.

College is not a great representation of how people work together. It’s a giant mass of people of which people have to winnow themselves into smaller and smaller groups. It’s the entry-way to the groups that you want. Recruiting is not a department wide blast but layers of filters on filters. Small groups lead to other small groups.

College needs to be paired with a bunch of small events such as conferences, internships, and other programs. Your learning is a summation of the events you do rather than the long stretch of college itself, no matter what college you go to.

People think the meaning of college is something simple: networking, get a job, to learn things. But none of them exactly capture the process that I described above. College is not all about the classes; it’s about the group associations. It’s about the network, but not really “networking,” i.e. meeting a bunch of people of low skill who will try to nepo their friends into whatever firm they find themselves at. Vertical networks are often more informative than horizontal networks, because older people have experienced more, but the difficulty younger people have is understanding where they’re coming from.

The “networking” some try to do is by meeting a bunch of random people with little similar direction. Naturally, they all go their own ways. and because a lot of people don’t build skill and expertise in college, “networking” is the blind leading the blind. Don’t be around people who don’t care about anything.

They think see the goal of college is to “have a good time” and “get a job (sinecure),” and the large amount of people who think of college like this ruins it for the rest of us. Admittedly, I went along with some of that because I didn’t know what else to do, but I think some things never take hold because there’s the internal resistance because the types of people don’t innately match. and I don’t think I really met a single person in college that I respected and looked up to, but I did admire fragments of different people’s personalities, and maybe that’s the path we’ll all head down as we become more and more different.

And if I went to a different college (not public, more higher ranked), I suspect the types of things that people did would feel internally right faster, and I would have quickly found an understanding. but maybe it wouldn’t have, I don’t know. Some personalities are naturally lonesome.

I did enough drinking to understand why people like it, and then I stopped because it isn’t worth it. But I really could understand how people would enjoy it, how people felt warm and friendly, and why someone would do it. It wasn’t that hard to stop, but it was never a natural fit.

If you’re so good, so focused, so talented at what you do, you can create value out of nothing. Structure out of chaos, you can inspire the people who need a light.

It’s never been about undistinguished peers floating with each other in a haze. It’s been about people with the same direction, teachers and students, talent and self-cultivation.

“My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period”

— Ten Lessons I wish I Had Been Taught, Gian-Carlo Rota