Review: Hacking Your Education (Dale J. Stephens)

Hacking Your Education... or as I like to call it: An Introvert's Guide to Honing Street Smarts, Building a Network and Embracing Self-Directed Learning  

As far as college-related books go, I've read James Altucher, Blake Boles, and Andrew Roberts (plus a ton of other shorter works). Out of all these writers, Dale J. Stephens has provided what is arguably the Summa of launching your life without college and making the most of college if you still end up going. Perhaps at some point (after plenty of experience "hacking" my own education), I should try my hand at writing what I shall call the Summa Hackademia to carry on the project. For now though, Dale's book is my Start Here! reference book for anyone who asks about making it as a Millenial.

The Physical Book.  HYE was published by Penguin Books USA. It's paperback with a page count of roughly 200 pages. It's small enough to carry around and fit in the pocket of a light jacket. To be honest, it looks kinda like a software manual. From the back at least. But it is well edited/formatted compared to some self-published books on the same subject. As for the font, I was even able to read under low-light and make sense of the ideas.

Main Sources. As a hackademic and serial unschooler, Dale's big on real world experiences. There are oodles of anecdotes from daring individuals who either dropped out of college, opted out or finished but gained entirely new skills through good ole' self-directed learning. Often what you find in this genre are people who actually did go to college but recognized the opportunity costs of college after the fact. Dale gets instant street-cred for having lived out the advice in this book.  By including short profiles of many others, the argument becomes more convincing that taking on big projects at 18 is a viable way to launch one's adult life. 

Is College Worth it? The first chapter was dedicated to assessing the value of college. Most college-hacking books follow this format. Here's an opportunity I've noticed. A significant portion of the audience is already pretty much sold on leaving the Ivory Tower to pursue their own projects. In my case, the main value of this chapter was understanding why others decided on an alternative trajectory after high school. I think there's a market for a book which provides the case for education hacking from a "mature" perspective. These books exist, I think, and I will review them. It's just that they are rare and often pre-MOOCs or even pre-internet. I plan to read Anya Kamenetz's DIY U and then, I will see how well it makes the case to a wider audience.

By the voice in which HYE was written, I just get the sense that Dale's audience was basically his age group. Don't get me wrong, though. this is still a Romantic work. It inspires wonderlust, independence, and risk-taking. As a young person, I eat it all up. I'm just not so sure my dear quinquagenarian mother would. 

Ideally, hackademics can move out on their own, but it helps to have the support of family because, to put it frankly: shit happens. If you watch any media coverage of programs like the Thiel Fellowship, reporters are always inquisitive about how the fellow's parents took the news that their  Ivy educated children will be changing course. Of course, the answer is always that parent's didn't take it well. When you're trying to make it without a degree, the last thing you want is a resentful parent(s), so I think this aversion to risk is a cultural hurdle Americans have to get past and something we all need more advice on navigating. Dale's fortunate circumstances were that his mom was a teacher with an open mind to unschooling and so he got started in that community even before high school.

The Fun Begins. After the first chapter, that's when I got into the substance of the book. Instead of telling you "Find a mentor," Dale offers a template for reaching out to high profile people you're interested in learning from. Instead of just saying "Join a interest-based community," he tells you how to get in to an exclusive conference and how to pitch ideas. I could go on and on about the things I learned here. These are the areas where Dale takes the comparative advantage over older writers. As a Millenial, he gets to include the back-door solutions that make any sensible person squeamish. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Contents:

1. Understanding the System
2. The Hackademic Mind-set
3. Identifying Your Talents
4. Finding Mentors and Teachers
5. Building a Community/Network
6. Finding Educational Resources
7. Learning from the World

These seemingly straightforward chapter titles do not speak for themselves. The gems are hidden under subsections called the "Hack of the Day." In these pages, Dale abstracts away the methods used by each hackademic he interviewed and so the reader is able to apply the steps in new situations. If you think you can't become a ship captain or live in Paris under $1000, think again. There are no guarantees, but this book makes it clear how much you can grow by forging your own path even if it backfires. Some might be skeptical about how well these ideas work when you're a minority, but Dale does a good job of addressing that skepticism through the diverse examples he includes. 

In conclusion, I really couldn't come up with any criticisms of HYE. Dale has perfected the art of education hacking and distilled his experience into book form for us all to make use of. In fact, he started an organization called Uncollege that provides plenty more resources on education hacking as well as hackademic camps and a Gap Year program where the emphasis is on experiential and networked learning through travel, internships, and projects. I'll be checking out their collection of resources on the website and re-reading HYE from time to time. Going back to my alternative title, these skills are things many extroverts like Dale pick up on the fly, but after HYE even the introverts don't have an excuse. 

Robert Greene on College

"Basically, I tell people: when you get out of college, if you go to college, you have to suddenly throw out everything you learned. It's fine that you learned about history and great novels and stuff, but you did not learn about the real world. It's a completely different environment out there. You didn't learn how to deal with people. You didn't learn how to deal with political situations. You didn't learn how to practice a real life skill. Take everything that you learned in the university and say that it was very nice and throw it in the garbage can and start your real education which happens when you go out in the work (world?)"

Is Data Science Suited to Self-Motivated Learning?

From datajobs:

"As a matter of fact, data science is such a relatively new and rising discipline that universities have not caught up in developing comprehensive data science degree programs – meaning that no one can really claim to have "done all the schooling" to be become a data scientist. Where does much of the training come from? The unyielding intellectual curiosity that data scientists possess drive them to be passionate autodidacts, motivated to learn skills on their own with deep determination"

Sometime this week, I realized that on sites like Quora, a lot of motivated, self-taught data scientists were unsure of their job prospects given that on one hand, job titles like "data analyst" tend to be in traditional firms, while on the other hand "data science" touts itself as a hot new profession in the post-MOOCs era. I decided that the only way to answer the question would be to go and do the survey myself. I've been connecting with the data science community on Twitter for some time now and figured it would be a good place to deploy the survey.

As an aside, I find it hard to think of MOOCs qua technological advancement as the catalyst for the self-taught data science. Rather, there is an entire social structure that allows the MOOC to make an impact. It's absolutely crucial for those opting for self-education to establish themselves in their field of interest via innovative means. See my upcoming post "A Guide for the Perplexed Pt.1" for more on that.

So I decided that SurveyMonkey would be the easiest way to handle it. I didn't give it much thought because the entire network of people and information that I'm building here requires swift action to keep up with the trends. I'm not waiting for someone else to solve my problem, right?

So here's the survey over at SurveyMonkey.

Things are still a bit slow but I just have to keep sharing it with people and hope we get some decent responses. While I'm waiting for responses, it's a good time to figure out which problems I'll run into in analyzing and interpreting the data. It's quicker to have the problems and solve them than to go through the process of learning survey design from scratch. That's certainly within my plans but I'd like to have some prior experience before investing time into studying it formally!

Update: Interpreting the data was much more challenging than I thought. Opportunity to have some fun getting my hands dirty :-).

p-e-r-e-g-r-i-n-a-t-i-o-n, Pt. 1

With the burgeoning student debt and rising unemployment rates among recent graduates, Some millennials are facing a hard time where previous generations had a brighter outlook. On top of it all, a decrease in physical and emotional well-being has been documented among indebted Millenials. There is decreasing confidence in college career-centers as avenues for job placement, and college graduates are recognizing the need to compensate for skills they did not hone in their undergraduate years. Initiatives to make instructional material accessible to the public such as MIT OpenCourseWare and the edX platform have lessened incentives to attend college solely for educational purposes albeit increasing the probability that some students will achieve more than previously possible. For undergraduate students disillusioned by the student debt crisis and an unpredictable job market, entrepreneurship during college can provide viable alternatives to conventional career paths due to trends in the academic landscape favoring students with the ability to capitalize on its abundance of resources.

“Oh God, Mr Titus Hoyt, where you learn all these big words and them? You sure you spelling them right?”

Funny enough, I wrote that stuff for a college paper of all things. What I really wanted to say in the paper was that some students are better off going the entrepreneurial route, foregoing college altogether. The question you must be asking is, what could possibly give a student the audacity to write a college paper about the failure of college. It makes sense if you read "abundance of resources" as bread and circuses.

I first recognized this flaw before deciding on any schools. I recall overhearing my mom say to a friend on the phone with a sigh, "I don't think he wants to go to college." I guess the sentiments I was expressing at the time were like the overall sentiment Tyler was describing in that one Fight Club scene:

"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables... We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Maybe 16 year old me wasn't exactly "pissed off", but the fact I was slowly learning was that this magical place called college I had heard about all these years was just not going to give me the tools to succeed in the job market of the 21st century. Of course, it is debatable whether one should place emphasis on employment but that's for another post.

After getting my acceptance letters, I neglected my misgivings. I was going to be a Civil Engineering major. That was recession proof guaranteed, right? A Real Degree, they say. It turned out that I wouldn't be a guinea pig for the engineering degree experiment after all, since the curriculum proved to be an intellectual space in which the uninitiated flail around hopelessly trying to figure things out. Talk about filtering classes. I had been too late to the party. No amount of Amazon Prime documentaries or moments of awe in New York City or Dubai could inspire me to like engineering, at least the way my curriculum worked. This wasn't for me, it was tailored to those who knew they would be engineers for years prior to college, I thought. Couple that with the stereotype that engineers have uni-dimensional personalities and you get a whole heap of turn off. (Obviously, engineering is an occupation which is neither inherently cool nor inherently drab. It all depends on what you personally find interesting. I still think that through learning about a subject from a non-academic context first can help in developing appreciation, but more on that in another post.)

Cue Macroeconomics. I was always interested in economics, but could never fancy myself an economics scholar nor economic analyst. But oh did I enjoy studying economics, because when it comes to higher education economists will tell it to you straight, without resorting to some transcendental woo behind a college degree. Not many others would offer information that potentially jeopardizes their own industry or at least the positions their academic peers enjoy.

More on the economics of higher education and what I actually learned at college, in part 2...

Jimmy Wales on Frugality

Here's what Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, had to say to Millenials: "I think one of the most important pieces of advice I can give young people is that you should try to arrange your life in such a fashion that you minimize your consumption expenses as much as is practical so that you take on as little debt as possible."

Growing up, I came in contact with very few who shared this perspective. In Belize (as with the rest of the world, basically) ownership of certain commodities signal security against the backdrop of a developing economy. At least this environment incentivized a sort of business savvy among my peers and I, constantly selling, importing and buying items from each other. Ironically, it wasn't until moving to the US that I came across the notion of minimalism. Against both the ascetic ideals of self-deprivation, and the indulgences of consumerism, minimalism upholds the value of living deliberately and actively seeking out the things which provide measurable improvements to your life in the long run. It is often superficially conceived of as restriction based ethos in which people pick an arbitrary number of items they wish to own, and proceed to pare down their possessions until they reach that magic number, but writers on the subject have expressed disagreement with that version. 

In the entrepreneurial community, the ability to cut back on waste and focus on that which is most important is one deliberate safeguard against uncertainties. After all Wales himself is more or less an entrepreneur even while Wikipedia has towed the hard line against monetizing in any way. The quote from Wales came from the site Quora. Yes, the same place where users give each other advice on how to accomplish anything from learning a new skill in 10 minutes to buying the cheapest car possible to live in and moving to the Silicon Valley area. I find it to be useful advice, perhaps because I came to the same conclusions myself. Who could argue with a co-founder of Wikipedia.

To my surprise, the one place in America in which this attitude should be exemplified hasn't gotten the memo (at least in my experience). That place is the American university. Contrary to the image of starving academics huddled over cups of Ramen noodles and passing the time away cogitating on hefty tomes packed with the very best of human insight, what I experienced at college in my very first semester was an appalling amount of glut. 

What Wales is saying is not directed at college students per se. But the painstakingly obvious is that being a college student is often antithetical to following his advice. To illustrate this indulgence literally, here's an example of what I saw at college: At the end of every week, students who had signed up for meal plans would have almost half or more of their "swipes" left over and would go to the cafeterias, food courts and restaurants to spend the remainder only to stock it away one of the many mini-fridges in the dorms. This food would then be given away, thrown out, played with, etc. or sometimes eaten. Many opted for the non-perishable foods to avoid having to throw it out, so these processed foods eventually become a big part of the student's diet. To be fair, there were some great health food options in at least one of the cafeterias. Kudos to the school's dietitian. (If you're a student trying to avoid the "freshman 15" or an athlete, these people can help you make healthy choices. If you're too lazy to meet with them, take Michael Pollan's advice: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" Emphasis mine.) 

Let's face it though, no one really cares about whether college students themselves are underfed Ramen noodle repositories or overfed dwellers of the dining hall. I mean, let the scholars enjoy some aspect of their stressed out lives, right? The point is that as a college student, one must take a serious interest in living deliberately, otherwise you end up with too many meal swipes, taking the wrong sections of a class, spending upwards of 6 years on a Bachelor's degree, etc. Little things like that...

Mr Titus Hoyt, I think you making up all this, you know, making it up as you go on. (Part 1)

Listen here, Boyee. There are two parts to this "math" story and for the second part, you sure as hell have to make it up as you go on. This applies to any field. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. There is a historical part and the conceptual part. The historical part is one that may as well go back to Adam, or in other words the Pleistocene, because it involves the progression of mathematical ideas throughout history when the First Man, himself, gazed upon existence and put 2 and 2 together (figuratively, of course). The conceptual part goes back to when you were still mom's little bundle of joy and the stack (of concepts) was just as short as you, so in effect, it is also "historical" but that is besides the point. Well not really, there is notable parallel here between the knowledge of whole civilizations and the knowledge of reasoning individuals. The conceptual sequence is more self-explanatory, but in general I'm referring to the logical structure of mathematical science from each perceptual observation (evidence of your senses) and induction from counting numbers up to the Calculus. The point here is that although generations of humans have known xyz each individual has to learn xyz on their own, step by step.  My argument is for the conjunction of these two stacks for the Mathematical education of the young. Not only do they need epistemology to form mathematical concepts but they also need a general historical narrative to engender an appreciation for the science itself.

N.b. In separate discussions, we will look at the historical development of induction from Aristotle onward but the process is demonstrated clearly in mathematics, so we won't be short on examples. 

Titus Hoyt began to teach.

Errol, here's a library card. You're welcome.