Agreed. 90% of the accomplishments on my resume are thanks to writing good essays in applications and receiving fellowships, internships, and admission to Stanford. I'd say I'm a competent engineer but nothing extraordinary. Writing made all the difference.
if your goal is to just learn as much math as you can. Why matriculate in the class and pay tuition? I've never seen a professor check if everyone is matriculated let alone kick anyone out for not being matriculated. Plus no bureaucracy. :-) I've sat in on tons of classes. Also MIT, Stanford and Berkeley post video lectures, notes, assignments exams of math classes online. also free. save the money and get a better apartment.
Because at any given moment I may have some side projects that "might potentially make some money" going on, and if I don't pay for a class, I will naturally just want to work on those projects - this has been proven out by history.
"Basically women aren't generally willing to devote their lives to the kind of intellectual pursuits that 90% of the time poor, downtrodden, old and alone."
But women are totally willing to devote their lives to the kind of pursuits like caring for the children, sick, and elderly in their family that 90% of the time result in them being poor, downtrodden, old, and alone. They just play the odds better by doing work and not getting paid for it.
And then on top of that, they write articles about how it sucks. These women are getting out of control!
I think the list was right to include only men. But your idea that women aren't willing to devote their lives to intellectual pursuits 90% of the time is disgusting. Most people only paid for their sons to be educated. What kind of intellectual pursuits from 90% of women would you expect to magically appear from that scenario? Now that it's acceptable for women to be educated. They make up 55% of college students, so we can probably expect more contributions in the future. Sure computer science and engineering are severely lagging, and it will take some time and effort to introduce that field to more women, but it's not because "women aren't willing to devote their lives to those kinds of intellectual pursuits"
I studied engineering because daddy's an engineer. At a young age I didn't comprehend how fulfilling math and science could be, I didn't understand the creativity and depth and purpose it could bring to me. It turns out daddy has been right a lot of the time.
Also, sure some highly successful people dropped out of college, but perhaps even more highly successful people stuck with it so I'm not sure I agree with "a lot". How often does impulsiveness and ego result in one's downfall as opposed to one's success? I certainly think taking the jump is much more interesting, but we also mostly hear about the success stories. After watching plenty of crappy actresses on screen one could conclude it's easy to earn millions smiling in front of a camera, but that's not the case.
I didn't mean to appear to disparage college, I myself am a recent graduate.
The point I was making was that some people, in order to be highly successful, have to do things that seem weird, risky or downright crazy in order to get ahead (things that their friends, family, business partners, investors etc wouldn't approve of or don't see the reason for).
Examples:
- Sergey Brin is on leave from his PhD studies in Stanford. If the price of me not having to use Yahoo or MSN to find stuff online is the knowledge that one of Google's co-founders doesn't have his PhD yet because he dropped out of his studies to co-found Google, then that's a price I'm willing to pay ;-). Apparently his parents still aren't happy that he doesn't have it, even though he's the 24th richest man in the world.
- A guy called Michael Burry was the first man to 'predict' the housing market collapse in the US. Author Michael Lewis profiled him in his book, 'The Big Short'. His investors criticized him for years that such a stance was insane, un-American, impossible etc. Mr. Burry didn't listen to any of them, and stuck to his guns because his own research and insight told him he was right. He made millions in a short space of time when things went pear-shaped near the end of 2008. Others copied his strategy also, and made out like bandits.
I'm learning how to code right now too and it's been frustrating to find resources that truly start at the beginning without assuming you know things from other languages. Right now I'm looking into using Google App Engine and python and these are the best resources I have found:
-Another resource that I found very helpful is a book called Head First Java, I'm not really into Java but the first few chapters give a great overview of Object Oriented programming. I wasn't sure what the difference between a class and object were, and I was unsure about other very basic questions. This book answered all of those questions, and it's written in a very entertaining style.
-I'm also reading a book called "using Google app engine" also starts from the beginning, and introduces all the technologies that go into Google App Engine. I found that book on gigapedia.org btw.
-I tried zed shaw's learn python the hard way book. I've only done the first few examples so I don't have an opinion on it yet. But so far I think it's a good resource for short little exercises to learn your way around python syntax, but I definitely needed more of a programming background which is where all the other resources I mentioned above fill in the gap.
by the way i would definitely recommend python over other languages I've looked into because at least as a beginner, python syntax isn't complicated to learn. But if you are interested in learning say Java, there is a Stanford online course that might be good, so just look at their online course offerings.
A final python resource which I found was Guido Van Robot where you basically control a robot in a maze using python. I haven't looked at it too closely yet but it seems entertaining and helpful for the beginner. If you're familiar with Karel the Robot, Guido Van Robot is the exact same thing, except using python.
http://gvr.sourceforge.net/
For some reason it didn't occur to me to look at some of the resources avail. through Universities. I will be sure to check out your suggestions.
For those interested in Ruby I did find a free book on Ruby and after glancing through a few pages it seems to be written in an interesting way with funny references.
