Columbia or Duke?

confidentialcoll
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:37:12 +0000

I might be tempted to hire the candidate that I thought learned the most in college.



what makes you think I haven’t learned anything, I just find simpler ways to learn things. Taking a bad professor who is difficult to follow, makes your classes more difficult and you do not come out learning more. I haven’t found a strict relationship between time spent on something and learning, there is obviously a threshold of time required to learn something, but that threshold is usually low if you know what to learn and how.

I would probably not want to work for someone like vossron (if you were being serious). The fact is, that the knowledge you memorize in college classes is quickly forgotten no matter who you are, but the techniques and intuition remain. Some of the most important “intuitions” that I’ve picked up, have been taught in 5 or 10 minutes in a single class. I’ve wasted double digit hours on a single problem set before, and haven’t taken much from it other than some pride that the road was challenging.

And this is just sticking to the academic side of things. On top of this, there are interpersonal skills, learning to ask for help, learning to collaborate well, figuring out how to efficiently use a system of resources etc. These are non-academic life-skills, which can separate analysts from managers and good leaders/managers/entrepreneurs from bad ones. In college people sometimes forget to hone these skills.