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thomblake comments on On the Fence? Major in CS - Less Wrong
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This seems to contradict your sentiments. If academia is the ticket to the not-grind, then why is it also the source of the 'grind'?
In my experience, one can do passably well in university while giving little thought to trivialities like what your grades are. Of course, it depends upon the college program, and what you expect to get out of it. Some universities these days seem to be of the opinion that they're technical schools, out to train people for particular careers.
The contradiction you are seeing isn't in my post; rather, it is in the way academia (at least in the US) is actually structured. Ostensibly, graduate programs want to recruit candidates who will do creative, original research. Yet, the qualifications they demand (grades) have little to do with creativity and everything to do with being the best human emulation of a computer that you can be.
What undergraduate schooling mostly tests: excellence in rote memorization, speed of solving trivial problems, performance on demand and to spec every day, the willingness to carry out a meaningless task on somebody's say-so - these abilities are mostly orthogonal to aptitude for original research. And yet they are the primary entry criteria.
And doing "passably well" typically won't get you into a Ph.D. program.
This is not my experience. It sounds to me more like you're describing elementary school. Of course, it could be that you went to an exceptionally bad school, or that I went to an exceptionally good one.
No, but making the right kind of professional connections and being brilliant will get you into a PhD program, regardless of your grades. Though there are some schools that have a grade cut-off before the department is even allowed to consider a student; I think that sort of thing is criminal. If you find yourself in that unfortunate situation, consider entreating your professors to inflate your grades, or better yet, choose a different graduate school.
I'm describing a large public US university which I attended, one considered fairly respectable in the sciences. And I have seen scarcely any reports of experience different from my own in this respect. The people with nothing to complain about tend to be the ones with sufficient rote learning / calculation talent to avoid having been burned in the way I describe.
Are you joking?
Almost every graduate program in the country has the GPA cutoff.
I'm not familiar with this. Do you have a citation / source / study to confirm this?
Well my experience can be counted as one of the 'scarce' ones then, and I hadn't until now heard any reports quite like yours. I suppose I should mention then that I went to Southern Connecticut State University, for anyone interested in avoiding the sorts of things asciilifeform refers to, in case my university really was that unique. We do have some world-renowned departments, so I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised.
Only my own experience in trying to find places to apply to.
I suspect we might simply have different views on what constitutes meaningless gruntwork (as opposed to preparation for original research.) To me, this would be pretty much anything which asks for on-demand, closed-book performance, adherence to schedules, any activity involving memorization, and in essence anything short of unbridled freedom to pursue the topics which interest me at my own pace.
Indeed it seems we are just talking past each other. "unbridled freedom to pursue the topics which interest me at my own pace" is what you have outside of school. The university is there to expose you to different ways of learning and thinking about things, different sorts of tasks, different personalities and styles of work, and subjects that might not interest you at the moment.
A lot of the things you complain about are components of a happy and productive life.
I often claim that people go to college too young. One should develop the discipline and drive to appreciate a university education before undertaking it - otherwise, one will miss the point and it will just feel like more high school.
To the extent that one judges that one ought to be exposed to different ways of learning and thinking, different sorts of tasks, and so forth, why not seek them out directly? It is sad but true that many people use autodidacticism as an excuse to be lazy--but it doesn't have to be.
Because these things are assembled to the end of beginning wisdom. Until you've begun the journey, you don't know what to seek out. It's especially problematic if the sorts of people who have something to teach you are the sort you can't stand to be around.
In terms of knowing what to seek out, I've always thought that the greatest resource available to the aspiring lover of wisdom is the university bookstore, and the carefully selected and graded texts found therein. You can learn far more by working your way through the upper-division assigned texts of a wide range of disciplines than you will ever learn from the classes themselves. I consider myself an autodidact, in that most of my learning at university was self-directed and independent of my coursework, but the structure provided by the progression of courses and their assigned texts was absolutely invaluable. I think the university bookstore is why my self-directed studies were so much more effective once I started attending university than before.