I did this. I had a 2.6 undergraduate GPA. At the time my policy was to go to a class three times - for the first lecture, for the midterm, and for the final. The rest of the time I spent working on my own projects. I then went on to get a job for a couple of years, and by the time I decided to apply to grad school I was left with a 2.6 GPA and not a single professor who knew me enough to write a recommendation.

So I took three of the hardest graduate CS classes I could find as a "non-matriculated student" (basically no degree, you just pay as you go for "professional" education), got a 4.0 that semester, and got each one of the three professors to write me a recommendation. Next semester, I was in grad school.

I maintained 4.0 for one more semester, until it slipped to 3.9. I always proudly tell this story every time someone talks about undergraduate GPA as a predictor of anything. (Actually, I would much rather hire people with a low undergrad GPA that shot up in grad school, than a high GPA all around).

I'm curious why someone would enroll in a college and yet not go to class. Sure, for frat boys who are going for "communications & alcoholism degrees" that makes sense, but for someone sincerely interested in learning it's very puzzling.

Well, look at it from an energy cost standpoint:

Going to class 3x per year: extremely low cost. Lost of free time. 2.6 GPA. Going to class every day: extremely high cost. Little free time. 3.x GPA (typically).

Given that semesters typically take 100+ days, you're talking a 30x increase in time spent to get a single point GPA improvement. Lame. This shows a problem with the classes and the teacher, as the teacher is apparently useless, not the student who is clearly smart enough to nearly BS a class and still get an easily passing grade.

Personally, I tend to fluctuate between 3.0 and 3.5. I do better in a lot of classes when I don't kill my brain listening to a bad teacher, and instead just read the darned book, which they test out of anyway. If going to the class is useless, and actively harmful, and you can get a good grade without going, what logic says you should go?

GPA is a laughable measurement of capability. It's much more of a measurement of boredom / lack of social skills. All my programming profs will (and have) happily write me a glowing recommendation, despite having a C average with one, and a low B with another. Of course, the C average one teaches level 450+ classes, and typically fails 50% of a class or more, so a C isn't too bad anyway.

So, why did you go to college at all rather than just studying/working on your own? Economic reasons, motivational reasons, the seal on the piece of paper with your name on it?

I agree with your logic, although my experiences were different. There were definitely classes worth skipping, but I also had classes where it was worth it to attend. YMMV, I would recommend to anyone testing the waters before deciding on a course of action.

I struggled with that question for most of my college education. The answer I eventually came up with was, "I went to college so I could meet lots of other people who were smart enough to pass the admission requirements and yet still willing to plop down $40k/year to learn things with absolutely no practical application."

Oftentimes, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

Easy. I went to college for the seal on the piece of paper, and access to people smarter than I, and tools I cannot easily access / afford (I'm also an art minor, favorites being metalwork & jewelry. Ever looked up prices for a foundry / smelting furnace?). The seal on the paper is worth a LOT of money in the long run, and access to smart people and tools lets me learn / do things I would not normally be able to.

I've always (always) had the stance that nobody can really teach anyone anything. All learning comes from the individual doing the learning, as it can easily be shut out if they simply ignore it. Thus, if you're learning, you're trying at least a little. (exceptions being made for "teaching" under torture)

People (teachers) and tools can make it significantly easier / better / faster than learning on your own from other sources, but ultimately you are the one doing the learning. The ball's in your park. I go to school / class because I see the value in it. I also slack where there is little to no value, or when I've learned all the class has to offer. To do otherwise is ludicrous, as I could be spending my time learning other things, which is significantly more valuable to me. My grade is temporary. Learning is not. Which is more important? Also, if an employer doesn't see the value in intelligence / learning, and only looks at my grades, I do not want to work there. They clearly have backwards goals compared to mine.

Grades, as pertaining to this, are not a measure of learning. They're a measure of how well you can match the test's metric, typically rote memorization of facts. Learning is connecting facts, and being capable of extending them, and that's hard to test. It also rarely requires real memorization, as you instead build off X to get to Y; you don't need to know Y, just the method, and the method could be applied in a thousand places instead of just the one Y.

One might argue that the perceived value (by employers or universities, if seeking a PhD) difference between 2.x and 3.x is greater than 30x

Potentially, though as I say at the link below, if an employer is selecting on my GPA instead of my skills ( / learning / intelligence), I'm not interested in working for them, so it's exclusively to my gain to not be employed there.

If I can't demonstrate why I would be an asset, I've failed far more severely than a low GPA would imply.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074501

That's well and good if you can afford to be choosy about your first place of employ when you leave college. Not everyone has that luxury. My GPA and/or degree definitely helped me get my first jobs which then gave me the opportunity to build up enough experience for grades to no longer matter. Being able to demonstrate why you would be an asset doesn't do you much good if HR won't pass your application along.

Yeah I had the same ideas when I was in school, but life consistently gets in the way. I took a year off to be with my GF who was going to school on the other side of the country. The job market was an utter wasteland. Nobody was hiring. At one point I resorted to going through the phone book. After 3 months of job hunting, I had two options: stock boy at Meijers (if you're not familiar, it's like Walmart) or software engineer at a small software company with a crappy boss working on software that didn't matter to anyone. By that point I had to choose one of those jobs, I could not afford (literally, monetarily) to be picky.

I took the programming job, and although it sucked, I got a lot of experience out of that job and am a better programmer today because of it. As horrible as it was, it probably sucked less than stocking shelves at Meijer would have, and I certainly got a lot more value out of it.

For me it was a combination of different reasons. First, for someone with my cultural background, the idea of not going to college didn't even occur to me. Second, there were appealing cultural aspects - living away from my parents for the first time in my life, etc. Third, at the time I didn't appreciate the value of formal education, but I certainly appreciated the value of learning, so I used the time to work on my own projects.

I basically lived on my own schedule - I could be reading a totally unrelated book while everyone else studied for the finals. I made a point of being proud of it too, kind of silly in retrospect, but it worked for me at the time.

In many cases the prof is doing the absolute minimum so they can focus on research. The lectures are often unoriginal (they are cribbed directly from the book). So someone sincerely interested in learning would be better off reading a few different textbooks or finding better lectures on the internet.

This is why I transferred from a large research oriented university to a small liberal arts college. The difference in lecture quality was night and day.

Or they're doing the absolute minimum so they can be employed. Quite a few profs I've encountered clearly aren't learning anything in their field any more. They're just being the typical drone, at least as boring an existence as the classes they jam down your throat.

Some I've had are extremely interested & active in their field, and they're all fascinating to talk with, and have useful, efficient classes. I've yet to see someone who isn't interested in their field do a good job teaching it.

I hate this, the other example is using lectures a good 10 years old that they inherited from a previous lecturer. Lectures from a book are terrible, they present a little bit of everything and nothing really substantial because there just a big book condensed down into some key sentances.

The lectures who have taken the time to write their own lectures always have more interesting lectures worth going to.

its what you do when you graduate high school and have no idea what you want to do with your life.

Disagree vehemently. Someone who "has no idea" would get a lot more out of class than someone who knows exactly what they want to do and how to learn it. If you know what you want to do, and you already are learning it, but feel obligated to go to school (cause society tells you to), then when it comes down to the day-to-day decision of "waste time in a class learning shit you already know" vs. "hack more"... it's easy to see why the second option wins.

I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life (software), but I fell prey to the "college is required to succeed" dogma. I went to university for a year, spent all my time hacking and neglected the boring/redundant classes, then left after a year with a 1.7 GPA and took a coding job with a big salary.

Class was a waste of time.

See, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I did quite well in school. I think a lot of it has to do with personality. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and an overachiever. I strove for A's in every class; if I was getting B's I took that as failing. The CS classes were easy, but I also had teachers who were good at keeping it interesting. I learned that I generally didn't need to bother with assigned reading, my jobs as TA and lab assistant meant I ended up helping everyone else with the coursework anyway, which was all the prep I needed. Since A's were guaranteed on almost all tests in CS, I would race other similarly cocky students to see who could finish fastest.

I went to a liberal arts school, so there were a lot of classes I had to take that were completely unrelated to my major. These were the worst and the least interesting to me in general, but I had enough free time from not having to study for my major that the extra work required to get by in those classes (it takes a lot longer to study something you don't care about) wasn't a problem. I got 3 non-A classes: 1 for missing too many classes (always hated morning classes), 1 because the professor didn't understand basic math and nobody got an A, and 1 because I got the date of the final wrong, missing it by a week (yeah, that really hurt, my only C).

My girlfriend, OTOH, went to school for an engineering degree mostly because that was what her mom pushed her for; she didn't really know what she wanted to do. Her financial aid didn't cover room and board so she had to work nearly full time at Starbucks. She was a very hard worker and her managers loved her, but school often fell by the wayside, partly she didn't have enough free time to give it the attention it needed, and partly because there was a lot of family drama that was affecting her emotionally at the time. She now works at an engineering firm where they love her because she's a fast learner and incredibly hard working, but her GPA is low enough that she's not sure she could ever get into grad school.

I also know plenty of people who are skipping because they either have no idea what they want to are to lazy to achieve what they want.

College is such an easy life if you don't need to work to much to support yourself, many are happy just staying where they are and are fairly unconcerned about failing things.

As a fellow believer in not bothering to go to class, my feeling on the matter was always that I would go to class if and only if it was at least one of (1) more efficient than reading the textbook, or (2) substantially different from reading the textbook. These were both rare properties.

Getting good grades is only worth it if the professors judgement of what you need to learn is more accurate than your own. Considering that a) your professor probably has likely very little real world experience and b) your professor has no sense of your own personal interests, goals, and strengths, self-directed learning is almost always the better option.

Except that getting good grades often has other benefits -- e.g. making it easier to win scholarships, get into grad school, and impress employers for internships or immediately post-college jobs.

I find for me if I have a more interesting class that one that I don't really like or just don't get initially I won't go to.

Last year we also had a group project which you could end up spending near unlimited time on, got a little unhealthy but I'd pretty much written up the whole core of it and was pretty happy with it so I kept pouring all my time into it. Also had an operating systems (mainly concurrency/compilers/memory management) which I loved and really aced. Also had a class on probability which was the first time I've had probability taken past the basic stuff you learn in general maths. Didn't get it well at first so it got next to none of my attention, didn't end up doing the homeworks which contributed to the end mark, crammed for it but still just failed. Hoping I find it more interesting this year.

"Also had a class on probability which was the first time I've had probability taken past the basic stuff you learn in general maths. Didn't get it well at first so it got next to none of my attention, didn't end up doing the homeworks which contributed to the end mark, crammed for it but still just failed. Hoping I find it more interesting this year."

Speaking from experience, probability and statistics will come up again in your life, and it is worth your time to learn them well. The answer to every practical question is "maybe," with varying degrees of certainty. You can't address these questions analytically without invoking probability and/or statistics.

I didn't take my statistics courses that seriously when I first took them, and have been making up for it ever since.

Yeah no doubt, hoping to get my head around it better this year.

Perhaps they are sincerely interested in learning but don't learn much from class.

If they are also pragmatic enough to see the utility of a degree, that would explain why they don't drop out of school.

I followed close to the same plan as the original poster, rarely going to classes. I had a medical disability note so I was able to do so without repercussions, but used my time off to focus on research which landed me a great job once I was done.

Why do you guys work with a GPA system? Why not use percentages?

What is a 4.0 GPA in percentage?

Because that doesn't work across classes. For introductory classes, a grade of A might correspond to a minimum of 90%-95% correct answers on evaluations because everyone excels at the material. For upper-level classees, a grade of A might correspond to 75% correct answers.

All grading systems are essentially arbitrary.

A 95% average could be the same as an 80% or a 99% somewhere else. A 4.0 GPA could be a 3.1 or a 4.3 somewhere else (some schools use a "4.0" scale that goes above 4.0).

This isn't an American perspective, and I know American academia is pretty different to elsewhere (wtf 7 year PhDs!) but over my life I've found that the rules for admissions into various things were usually just rough guidelines that people take way too seriously.

For example, I have a Masters degree, but I never finished an undergraduate degree (I dropped out). Similarly, though less bureaucratically, there are plenty of other dropouts working here at Google leading awesome projects, despite the 'must come from a top school or have a PhD' image it has.

It's cheesy, but in all such cases, I've seen that the biggest hurdle was getting over the "no you can't because you don't have X", either by trying harder, or by having someone else show you the way (or by dumb luck, in my case).

My own story is pretty similar to the article's, except s/graduate school/Google/.

I've found that people tend to discount the past pretty heavily, at least in America. Nobody cares if you were lazy five years ago, as long as you've worked hard in those five years and have a record of concrete accomplishments to show that. If you went to a community college and then finished undergrad at Harvard, people will see the Harvard degree. If you went to a state college for college and then went to MIT for grad school, people will see the MIT degree.

The hard part is getting into Harvard or MIT or Google with that past record.

I think the important part for that is to not let your current circumstances define you. If you've been turned down for that dream job and have to work on CRUDscreen enterprise apps to pay the bills, it's really easy to sit back and get comfortable writing CRUDscreen enterprise apps. If you want to give that dream job another try in the future, though, it's important to continue working as if you got it, either by doing your current job to the standards of the dream job, or by keeping your skills sharp with side projects outside of work.

BTW, I think you were my phone-screener for Google, so maybe the article's point about having someone on the inside pulling for you has some merit.

I agree with your comment that qualification X isn't necessarily needed, but it has it's limits of course. If you want to go into academia or a professional field such as medicine, the qualifications can be very rigid. Sometimes you can get away without a lower degree (e.g. bachelor's), but pretty much always need the terminal degree (doctorate).

As far as long PhD's are concerned, I think it's a difference in funding structure and expectation from some other countries. For one thing, when you hear that someone was doing their PhD for 7 years, that almost always encompasses master's work as well, even if they weren't awarded a master's. I am most familiar with how physics grad school works in the US, where the average PhD takes 6 years. Generally students who do get a master's on the way to a PhD get it after 2-2.5 years, so they spend 3.5-4 years on their PhD by itself. Another big difference from how things are done in the US versus what I know of in European universities is the way students are funded. Most European students I know are funded by the university/government and given 3-4 years to complete their PhDs. After that, they have no more money. In the US, funding is secured by the grad students themselves by essentially being hired by a professor as a researcher or working as a teaching assistant for a professor or the department (or possibly winning a fellowship from a government agency). Often this funding is on a semester to semester basis and in principle can last indefinitely. The fundamental nature of research means that it can last a long time when external constraints, such as funding, are not in place. I think my university had a rule that you had to graduate within 12 years or so.

I think the personal connections angle is often under-appreciated by those who simply see the formal rules and bureaucracy.

For example, if you can get a job working at a university, that can make it a lot easier to get into a postgraduate course than if you're some stranger walking in off the street; and it can end up cheaper, or even funded through part-time work, etc. This is the de facto angle my girlfriend used to get into an economics PhD program at LSE, starting in a relatively low-level research position when getting out of the boring banking sector before the proverbial hit the fan.

I've seen people who were able to enroll as non-degree grad students for a semester or two and then be admitted.

Unfortunately this route means you don't get any funding. Taking a research position at a university might be a better path for someone with financial constraints.

But yes, I've heard of people doing this too and I can imagine it working. Professors who know you like you a lot more than professors who don't know you.

It might also work to be in only one class, allowing you to still have your normal job, etc. I think the main thing would be to show the department/professor that you can cut it at the university.

If you can get a research job and take class(es), you're practically a grad student already :)

My undergraduate GPA ended up being a 2.6. I ended up admitted to 4 graduate programs this last admissions cycle. My professors apparently wrote some excellent letters of recommendation for me.

I thought I'd mention that since the article (and others) mentions that it's harder to get in with a low GPA these days. This may be true, but it is still possible.

Your professors should know you after you finish taking classes with them. Preferably you should also be doing research with one (or hell, more) of them. Showing a professor your research potential is the quickest way to change your letter from "smart but lazy" to "smart and hardworking, but stubbornly doesn't care about the mundane class stuff that none of us really think is that important for research anyways."

As an aside: If you're interested in doing graduate work in security, please contact me. (My e-mail is listed in my profile.) We're always looking for good researchers and if you're good, we'd be interested in your application and it's possible I can poke someone on the admissions committee to make sure your app gets looked at thoroughly.

Also: Apply broadly. I had success at a few programs, some ranked higher than the one I'm in. I'm where I am because I followed funding and I wanted to be near the Bay Area.

I know very few PhDs how got into grad school by having good grades and sending out applications. Most professors have a certain amount of autonomy i choosing who they want as PhD students. My girlfriend for example never applied for anything. She did some work with a professor who then asked her if she'd ever considered doing a PhD, my girlfriend said it sounded interesting the professor filed in some papers and that was basically that. I know a lot of other people as well who basically got in on some variation on that theme. So if you find a professor you want to work with and that professor wants you as a PhD student then things often work themselves out.

Tangentially, how do you get into a PhD program without any academic letters of recommendation (if, for example, you've been working in industry for a few years)?

Pretty similar to all the other suggestions - make contact with somone in the department who works on what you want to do your PhD in. Talk to them, find out what you need to do to get them to supervise you. If they won't ask for another name.

And be persistent.

And be able to show your skillz, to catch their eye. Otherwise you're just a name that wants special attention in a (potentially) large, seething crowd.

His other entry on what to put on your grad school application is pretty good as well:

http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2009/12/reading-phd-appl...

I currently am finishing my Diploma in Singapore Polytechnic. I have a 3.93/4.00 GPA, and is among the top, if not the top scorer in my course. Unfortunately, I would be unable to enter a local Singaporean university due to my "O" level results.

I dream of going overseas (USA) for my college studies, but due to the incompatibilities of our education system (Singapore follows the British education system), I don't think I'll get to use my diploma GPA for entry.

> I aced the programming classes

All grad schools care about is how well you did in that particular subject (or maybe a related subject, like math). You could easily ace your programming and math classes, bomb everything else, end up with a 2.0, and get into grad school. This isn't particularly surprising.

I don't think he claimed to be proud of it; he just noted that it happened. Sometimes that's how things go: you think you want to take one path, but then soon realize it's not the one for you. It sucks, but would it have been better if he had stuck with software engineering out of some sense of obligation to the admissions director, which would have probably made him a miserable, mediocre student?

I'm wondering if we're in a another bust or boom. Probably bust so I'm not eligible. :(

A bust is not the end of the world. There are many ways to get where you want to be.

About halfway through grad school I thought I might need to move for family reasons and thus had to apply to grad schools all over again. Having completed an MS by that point and a lot more research, very strong recs from people I had worked with extensively, etc., I got into every single program I applied to (including the top one in the country). I think my undergrad GPA was probably of little interest by that point, since they had a record of grad school performance. As it turned out I didn't need to move...

It isn't a great time, but I made it through last year with a 2.6, so if you're determined go for it.