Manage your expenses via Email, SMS, iPhone, Twitter, Voice (Call and say your expense), IM (Yahoo, AIM, MSN), or Web.
Moments of Clarity
Comments(3)
I’m watching a Yahoo Research talk by Christos Papadimitriou. Reminds me of a grad school story…
I was hanging around the grad student lounge, chatting with a friend about the computational theory class and our difficulty in grasping all the concepts. Christos was a professor at UCSD at the time and had literally written the book on the subject.
In the middle of our chat Christos himself walked into the lounge to get a snack. We worked up the courage to admit our lack of understanding and asked him to enlighten us on the whole topic.
We sat around the table, soon to be joined by 3 more grad students, and Christos started talking.
I learned more in the next 45 minutes than I had in 6 months. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. For the next three days I felt I understood everything. Not just computational theory mind you, everything.
Within a week I was back to my clueless self, but those few days of clarity were amazing.
This is why I think physical presence in universities still matters, and where you go to school also matters. Lectures may be delivered as effectively online, but there’s much more to university than lectures.
Oh. I think I have to reply.
1) I never wrote that lectures could be delivered as effectively online. Quite the contrary, I told people to stop lecturing. In your example, Christos is not lecturing, he is chatting with a group of students. Formal lectures are boring. Plus, most professors, including the famous ones, are terrible lecturers. If you really want lectures, pick the best out of a lot of pre-recorded lectures on a given topic, you will always do better than picking a random professor as your lecturer.
2) Physical presence is all about bandwidth. Please follow my links and read what I actually wrote. I did not say “physical presence does not matter”, I said “you need to offer the student a lot of interesting data quickly and interactively.” Up until recently, this was only possible offline. But as bandwidth and latency improve, that’s no longer true.
Once you will be able to hear and see the person as well as you would if the person was sitting next to you, what is left of the physical presence? Do you really want to smell the person too?
And yes, bandwidth and latency will get there. Faster than you may think.
3) You are assuming you would not have found someone as bright as Christos in a lesser school. Let me quote Paul Graham here: “The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department.” In fact, in a lesser department, you may have found the equivalent of Christos, but with slightly better availability.
The fact of the matter is that big schools are all about branding, not quality. It is like drinking Coke because Coke is obviously a better cola than the no-name colas out there, right? Big schools are very good at marketing, and they make sure that their professors shine. However, the brightest professor at your local state university can match, as far as his skills and knowledge go, any professor in your heavy-league school. And it is almost certain that you will have an easier time getting in his office.
BTW I am a graduate of the University of Toronto, arguably the “heaviest” Canadian school. Certainly among the list of top-3 schools in Canada. And you know what? The teaching was terrible. There were many famous people, but they were not very available nor very kind nor did they care much for the students (other than, maybe, their own graduate students). I saw no evidence that students got more for their money, except for the branding. I did get my first professorship because of my UofT degree… people thought it was a safe bet to go with a UofT graduate (the math. program at UofT is a killer). But I was not any better than I would have been had I attended another school.
[...] obviously meant to get me to react. He had one eye-opening experience while chatting with a famous professor. He reaches the [...]
A POV I agree with and I was on the other side, I was for both my degrees in small town college and in India.
It is for just profs, with peers like that you start at another level altogether.
Amit