A few days back, a family friend asked when I planned on going to college. I said, “I’m not. At least not right now.” I didn’t have the time to explain my reasoning to her, so I don’t think she understood. But here, I have the time and the words, and I’ll try to explain the reasoning behind this massive and unconventional life choice.
Let’s skip back ten years, to the summer of 2008. My siblings and I are debating with our parents about where to go for dinner. As with most families trying to decide on things, we vote on it. By purely counting heads, the option the kids want should win, but my parents throw a wrench into the rules: “adults get five votes”. Suddenly, the kids are outnumbered.
I don’t mind all that much – I still get free food, after all – but I’m curious as to the reasoning. “So we get five votes when we turn 13?” I ask, being a Jew, who gets her bat mitzvah and becomes an adult at 13. “No,” says my mother, “it would be silly for you to be able to just age into it. You have to earn your five votes. For our purposes, an adult is someone who’s graduated from college.”
From that point onwards, I made it my goal to get into Stanford, where both my parents went, and in fact where they met. It seemed an accomplishable goal: both my parents had gone, and so from a genetic standpoint I had everything I needed. Furthermore, I considered, they were not genetic flukes in terms of intelligence: most of my grandparents had gone to high-end schools. My maternal grandfather went to Harvard, my paternal grandfather to Yale.
I took my first class at my community college at 14, thinking it would up my chances for getting into Stanford if I already had an Associate’s by the time I graduated from high school. My brother, who had decided on a similar track, took the class with me. I wasn’t sure about a major yet, but it also didn’t really matter: there were a ton of prerequisites I had to take, for both high school and college, before I needed to worry about it. So, we took Spanish 1.
I had a great time in that class for a number of reasons. I was absolutely stoked to be going to college, albeit a podunk community college. My professor was great (only later did I find out that this was a blessing rather than a rule), the coursework required a lot of study but was nonetheless fun, and I got awesome grades. I felt I was preparing well to go to Stanford in four years.
The knowledge that I was going to a four-year college, and furthermore, I was going to a top-tier college (Stanford preferably, but Yale, Harvard, or something else comparable would also do), saturated my entire childhood. I made every decision based on what would get me into the colleges I wanted to go to. By my sophomore year, I’d either taken or planned for seven AP tests. When it came time to study for the PSAT, I spent nine months doing so to the near-exclusion of all else. For my Associate’s, I chose only those electives that would prepare me to apply to the colleges I wanted to go to.
Until sometime in the spring of 2018, when everything changed.
Unlike a lot of major life shifts, it didn’t happen slowly. It happened in one fell swoop of three chaotic weeks, as I realized three fundamental things.
Firstly, I was sick of taking classes. It had been four years, and community college courses had turned from a joy to a slog. Seldom did anything I worked on in my courses relate to the real world, and if it did at all, it reflected real-life work through a funhouse mirror. I was close to graduating high school with my Associate’s in computer science, and I felt I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. At last, I thought, I could start doing meaningful work and creating value for real people! Wait, no, I couldn’t. I had to go to college. Didn’t I?
I started to doubt my rationale for pursuing college so ardently. I’d decided I would do it when I was a child, mostly because my parents had both done it. When a child thinks something is worth pursuing, it’s not because they’ve done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that it’s the logical conclusion based on their knowledge and previous experience. A child thinks something is worth pursuing because it sounds impressive, fun, or cool.
Further, societal expectations had pushed me away from questioning the idea of going to college. Even when I questioned the usefulness of college, I needed only to look at any book or article, or to talk to any human being, and I would have my wishes to attend college validated. On top of that, even the people who said college might not be a necessity for everyone continued to say it was the best option for smart people. And given our societal propensity for scoring children on standardized tests, it was always very apparent to me how smart I was, at least from an intellectual standpoint.
But now it became apparent that college was not the best option for me, or even a terribly good one. Everyone knows that the cost of college in dollars is excessively and often prohibitively high, but on top of that, I had to face the opportunity cost. My goals in life, like most other peoples’, had to do with the real world, with making money in real life, with having a career. If I went to college, I would put all that off for four more years. And for what? A name on a résumé and a few connections. The former might not even be necessary: I didn’t know enough about the work world yet to know whether any of my future employers would even care whether I had a degree or not!
Lastly, I realized that I had another option. Sometime in the spring, I heard about a business internship program called Praxis. Their business model: create a more practical college alternative by giving young people a six-month professional bootcamp, followed immediately by a chance to apply what they’ve learned through a six-month internship at a startup.
The process of learning about Praxis was what kickstarted me out on questioning the path I’d presumed my life would take from childhood. I had to face the facts: recently, despite my stated goal and plan for getting into a top-tier school, I was moving towards it like a duty, an obligation. When I was younger, learning had been a joy; now, I yearned to apply what I learned. I had kept going because I saw college as an inevitable end for a smart person like me; if not that, what else?
The answer to that previously-unanswerable question became Praxis. The application process was intensive, with a multitude of essays and interviews on a very tight timeframe, but I came out the other end with a scholarship and a plan. A very different plan than the one I’d had before, but also a plan I liked a lot better. A plan that brought the light at the end of the tunnel closer, instead of further away.
It was still hard to cope with my decision. For the next few months after my turning-point, I doubted myself a lot. It felt horrible that I’d spent so long working monomaniacally towards a goal only to quit at the last second. But I had to remind myself, I wasn’t quitting. I was choosing a better alternative, since I had more information at seventeen than I’d had at eight (surprise surprise!). I reminded myself that the statistics showed the uselessness of college as a preparation for real-world jobs. That tons of people, entrepreneurs especially, became very successful without degrees. That the field I was going into—technology—didn’t have a strict degree requirement (unlike, say, accounting, where you cannot practice without a CPA, and to sit the CPA exam you need ~150 credit hours of college). That Praxis provided me with the sort of community I was hoping to get from a top-tier school.
At the time of this writing, I’m a month into the six-month professional bootcamp. So far, I’ve hand-coded my personal website (the one you’re on right now!), fixed up my LinkedIn and résumé, and created a personal pitch deck (more on that in this article). Everything I’ve done is immediately applicable to my career.
Contrast this with the inapplicable classes and assignments from last year: AP Latin, during which I badly translated texts by Caesar and Virgil that had been translated much better by others, and tried impossibly hard to be a little less horrible at literary analysis; AP English Composition, during which I wrote a ton of essays and analyses I’m never going to publish because the prompts are so obscure and the topics would be boring to read about, and also tried to be a little less horrible at literary analysis; and AP Java, which consisted mainly of writing code on paper, by hand, with a pencil: something no programmer in their right mind ever does.
Finally I’m working on projects and learning skills that will actually matter to me in the long run. While I was in school, I frequently had to say to myself, “This may seem obscure or stupid or useless, but it’s moving me towards my eventual goal, so it’s worth it.” Now, I don’t need to: everything I do has an obvious connection to my goal. I was dreading the next four years of my future; now, I have a fresh start.
I’m looking forward to it.
