Here is my advice, which is going to be completely different from everyone else here. As a caveat, I almost flunked out of college but am doing pretty well for myself right now, so take it as you may.
Just have fun. Screw classes. Screw trying cramming for tests. Do well enough to learn while not stressing yourself out. College doesn't matter at all for if you can succeed in life. If you have the chops, you don't need the degree. But, you will never have a chance to live up life as you will in college. It is the most care-free and awesome experience you will ever have, and if you're lucky you'll make some awesome memories and lifelong friends.
But if you must do well in school. Spend your time wisely (I also had a 3.7 my last year in college as BS CS). Sit in the first row, do all your learning you need to do in lecture. Do homework between lectures so you can party harder at night and wake up whenever in the morning. GO TO OFFICE HOURS. Pros and grad students practically give away answers on tests at those things.
That's exactly what I was going to post, but I feared the downmod army, to be honest.
I'm 34 now. Nobody has cared what happened to me in my early 20's since I was about 25. It just doesn't matter. Sure there are a lot of positives you can gain in those 4 years, but some of the most boring and average people I know define themselves by where and when they went to college and what they did there.
As an aside, my totally unscientific examinations suggest that people grow more after a year of travelling than they do after 4 of college.
"As an aside, my totally unscientific examinations suggest that people grow more after a year of travelling than they do after 4 of college."
As a corollary to that - study abroad while in college! It will never be cheaper, easier, or more socially acceptable. The semester I spent in New Zealand cost my parents about 1/3 as much as a semester at Amherst (mostly because tuition + room & board at New Zealand universities was around $7000/NZ, while tuition + room & board at Amherst was $20k+). It massively broadened my perspective - not just because I was in a different country in a different hemisphere, but because I was living on my own, with a 14-hour time difference from my parents, studying at a different school in a different university system. And if I hadn't gone, I'd have to have stayed back on campus while all my friends were abroad...
I think I probably would've gotten even more out of the experience had I been brave enough to go to a country with a different language and vastly different culture, eg. Nepal or Ghana or Madagascar. But there's a limit to how many variables in my life I can change at once. If you're more adventurous, go for it.
That's a great idea actually. Most people "go away to college" but just exchange one set of people for another within the same culture.
While you hit New Zealand, I'd add that for many of us of European decent, not only is that avenue open it may also be super low cost if you can obtain EU citizenship via ancestry.
Couldn't agree more. The statistic when I was in college was ~10% of students studied abroad, which I found shocking. A year's paid vacation to almost anywhere on the planet and 9/10 people said no! Also, despite the fact that you spend most of the time partying and traveling, employers look on study abroad favorably when you get out. I always found this amusing.
Two other things: 1) go to western Europe or Tokyo, or somewhere similarly developed and 1st world. It is far more difficult to go live in those places when you are no longer a student. 2) Go for a year. The people I studied abroad with who opted to do one semester were devastated when late December rolled around and it was time to go home. Although it may not seem like it, you aren't missing anything back home, and the friends you left behind will not have anything interesting to report when you get back.
1) That's actually not what I've heard from the friends that went to Ghana or Madagascar or Nepal - they seemed to get far more out of their study-abroad experience than us normal folk who went to New Zealand or Australia or Oxford. Many of them have traveled significantly since then - both to go back to where they studied abroad, and to other developed nations like Europe. Judging from my circle of friends, it seems like studying in the developing world is a life-changing experience while studying in the developed world is "merely" a nice experience to have.
2) Agree, but I didn't do so myself. Mostly because studying abroad was totally a last-minute decision for me - I got to a week before the deadline for the spring semester, found out all my friends would be abroad for the semester, and thought "Shit - what will I do for a semester?" Better halfway than never. My friends that spent a whole year got much more out of it - after a semester, you're still sorta a tourist, while after a year, you've really started to internalize some of the culture of your host country.
I think too that for a lot of people, they travel the year after they finish school, so they're a little older as well.
Mostly though it seems to be that once you realize there is a whole world out there with people of every shape, size and belief, you truly see all the possibilities of life.
Really? I would naively expect the outcome to matter a lot more. As a PhD, your work product has a lot more transparency than B.S./M.S. degrees, because people will actually hear about your work if it matters (for several different, valid definitions of "hear about" and "matters"). However, I would also naively expect the name of the school to correlate with outcome, but only because because different professors work at different schools.
The outcome is severely affected by what the faculty are doing at the school you end up at. Your chances of successfully completing a Ph.D. doing something completely different from what people are doing in your department are slim.
Well, google may in fact have specific qualifications that they require in order to work for them, but that's hardly representative of whether or not you can be successful, unless your entire definition of success is a job at google.
My point is that outside of academia and a few outliers, most employers don't give a lick where you obtained your degree. Sure, some people are charmed by an Ivy league school on your resume. I can bet though that more people are charmed by what you are actually doing than where you went to school.
i don't believe the point is whether you will be successful with a PhD. you can be successful with a PhD from almost anywhere. you can be successful without one, too.
the point is that the name on the PhD matters. and it does. it doesn't ALWAYS matter. but it does matter.
It's not as bad as it is for MBA, law, or (at the extreme) humanities PhD programs. In those fields, it's not even worth going if you can't get into a top program. Nonetheless, the ranking of the PhD program matters.
What matters more than the ranking of the program is the reputation of the advisor. However, at a no-name grad school, there may not be any reputable advisors in the field he wants to pursue.
If you merely pass, it's a difficult option. If your grades aren't good, you probably won't get funding, and you'll go to a school with less resources (in terms of money, equipment, and people).
I'm 34 now. Nobody has cared what happened to me in my early 20's since I was about 25.
I think college is less relevant, in a constantly changing social and technological environment, than it once was.
It used to make sense to front-load one's life with education, concentrating on schooling into the mid-20s and then starting to work. Considering education to be an investment, it was only logical to pursue it as early in one's life as possible. With such a rapid pace of change, however, this model doesn't make sense any more-- much of what you learn in college will be forgotten or obsolete in 20 years. In my mind, it makes more sense to start working at age 14 and spend 1 year out of 5 in some kind of schooling.
I wouldn't go that far. While I don't think college matters, "work" matters even less.
The beauty of front loading a life with education is that one can explore different avenues without any societal or personal pressures to perform before they are mature enough to do so.
I'm all for personal projects and starting side businesses as early as one can manage, but I wouldn't want that to be the societal norm because it would corrupt the experience, exactly as it has corrupted the college experience.
I agree with this. I also think you should follow the advice I gave, but don't imagine that my advice and charlesju's advice are completely contradictory :)
Just have fun. Screw classes. Screw trying cramming for tests. Do well enough to learn while not stressing yourself out. College doesn't matter at all for if you can succeed in life. If you have the chops, you don't need the degree. But, you will never have a chance to live up life as you will in college. It is the most care-free and awesome experience you will ever have, and if you're lucky you'll make some awesome memories and lifelong friends.
But if you must do well in school. Spend your time wisely (I also had a 3.7 my last year in college as BS CS). Sit in the first row, do all your learning you need to do in lecture. Do homework between lectures so you can party harder at night and wake up whenever in the morning. GO TO OFFICE HOURS. Pros and grad students practically give away answers on tests at those things.