Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)
I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset.
By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear!
I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half.
Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.
Exactly. It's not that there are 39 Awesome Icebreakers For Hackers, but rather that I have stories and experiences that (more or less) relate to almost anyone I'm likely to meet.
And yes, the stories are often more fun in the telling than in the living.
I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset.
By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear!
I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half.
Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.