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Mestroyer comments on Mistakes repository - Less Wrong
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Not autobiographical, all but one are people I know or have known personally. Which is not to say I have avoided all of these mistakes, but none of this is telling my own story. The ones about reasons for choosing college majors are speculation about other people's motivations, but are obviously mistakes whether they are the true reasons for people's bad choices or not.
Waiting through several years of depression and suicide attempts before telling anyone or getting it treated.
Not living on campus while you attend college, and also not having a car. (Edit: it has been pointed out that this often isn't that big a mistake. These are the circumstances under which I would call this a big mistake).
Not getting good enough grades in high school to get scholarships in college.
Going several thousand dollars into debt to pay for your first year of college classes, and then dropping out.
Living under parents who expect you to do several hours of manual labor per day while attending college, depending on them for rides to and from college, while sinking most of your income and lots of your time into construction of a cabin, far from said college in your hometown, which said parents own the deed to, while you do not have a car.
Registering as an engineering/nat science major in college when you are not good at math or cannot deal with hard work.
Having babies before you have finished all the formal education you want to get.
Not taking the time to apply for good internships during college.
Not taking enough time to apply for colleges during high school.
Not paying attention to deadlines for fellowship and grad school applications in the fall a year before school starts.
Not taking the GREs soon enough before you need to submit scores that you can retake them if you need to.
Not registering far enough in advance as an engineering major to take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam before you graduate (If it's a requirement at your school).
Choosing a major in college based on misconceptions about what you will actually be studying and/or what work that will qualify you for.
Choosing a major in college based on the difficulty during college, and not the effects it will have on the rest of your life.
Choosing a major in college because your friends have chosen the same one.
Choosing a college because your friends have chosen the same one.
Wanting to go into a technical field in college, but not taking the highest math and science classes your high school offers, and being forced to make them up in college (Not very life-altering, but can set you back a year).
I guess how bad a mistake that is depends on how bad public transportation is where you are.
On the other hand, waiting until you have your Ph. D. to begin breeding carries other risks. In this case, one should find an advisor that understands the stress maternity involves. It's entirely possible in some schools and disciplines to be practically done with classwork after the second year of study, and in some places it's possible to take a semester of unpaid leave without forfeiting the program.
Just freeze your eggs. Far cheaper than having children during the crucial early-career-building phase of your life.
It honestly blows my mind that people rearrange their whole lives around having kids early instead of doing this.
It's not surprising to me that it blows your mind, since you've reduced a complicated decision with multiple dimensions of considerations to a single criterion.
My comment was very (perhaps overly) vehement. That said, the two main problems arising from increased maternal age that are most typically cited are:
both of which become very significant after age 35.
By saving youthful genetic material, egg freezing solves these problems. However, in almost all online and in-person discussions I've participated in on the subject of maternal age, egg freezing isn't even brought up as an option and (this is more common in-person) people are either unaware that it exists or unaware that it is an established and reliable medical procedure rather than a fringe experimental one.
Of course, the processes of retrieving the eggs and implanting them can be unpleasant and stressful, but I really do think that this is on a different order of significance than "if you don't get pregnant before a certain age your body may become unable to conceive a healthy baby." There are also a host of other lifestyle concerns, such as the desire to have children early when one is more youthful and energetic. However, those tend to apply to men as well as women, and again are more a matter of preference rather than a universal and insurmountable thing on the level of infertility after a certain age. Egg freezing isn't a solution for everyone, sure, but when I see women planning their whole lives around having children before 30 I do get frustrated when they haven't even considered egg freezing.
It's kind of like mini-cryonics!
And you don't have to take its efficacy on faith!
It's pretty expensive: $20k+. I'm not sure if that's expensive enough that most women should dismiss it out of hand, but it's enough that most who would want it can't afford it.
Does it really help your long-term income? I mean, if you're taking years off for family, does the choice of doing so at 20 or 35 make much of a difference to your income in your peak-earning 50s? Also, IVF is expensive in its own right, as well as being invasive and unreliable. Plus you're still left with raising kids at an older age, when you're less able to keep up with them.
Taking care of kids can be physically demanding (carrying them around, chasing them down, etc.) and I expect it's a lot easier when you are younger.
It's also a lot easier when you can afford assistance.
Wealth isn't an automatic consequence of age (or of a PhD for that matter).
Absolutely true.
Neither is the ability to perform physically demanding tasks an automatic consequence of youth. We're talking about expected values, not guarantees.
And I would certainly agree that someone who doesn't expect their career to increase their earning power over time would have a completely different expected-value calculation around impromptublue's suggestion than someone who does.
Are there risks other than age-related rise in mutational load? My cousin waited to have kids until she finished her microbiology PhD, and they seem to be doing fine.
Not my field by a long shot, but this seems a decent survey of age-related health risks. In particular note lower average birth weight and higher incidence of very low birth weight.
I'm also aware of some evidence that having one's first child before middle age improves the outcome of having subsequent children during middle age.
ಠ_ಠ
This was a rigorous personal experience; she had an anecdotally significant number of kids.
Not being able to have any children, or as many as you (later realised you) wanted.
Does the age-related mutational load issue even kick in before 30 to a significant degree?
My girlfriend was required to live on campus for her freshman year- when she moved out, her rent was $300 cheaper, the apartmant was twice the size, and it also seemed nice to have a freaking sink, and not leave the dog at home. And I would expect the cost of a monthly bus pass to be exceeded by gas alone. So why was this a mistake for you or your friend or whomever? It's not at all obvious to me.
The friend in question had to spend more than an hour a day carpooling to get to and from campus. (I don't think there were any buses from where he lived). This meant tons of waiting around for rides because college schedules are sparsely scattered throughout the day. This also meant going to office hours was a pain, and he couldn't (like I, and most other engineering students I knew could) get into labs in the middle of the night to finish assignments that frequently took longer than expected.
That said, this probably isn't nearly as big a mistake in most people's cases, and I'm updating my original post to reflect that.
I've heard (but not experienced) that having to commute to campus, as opposed to being within walking distance, made people less likely to attend class regularly, and having to deal with any consequences of that. Obviously it depends on the person though. And on top of that, public transportation (at least in the US) can be slower and/or more unreliable compared to driving.
I fell into a similar failure mode. My program requires internships, but I hate the job-search process, so when I got an offer from a good company, I accepted it pretty quickly, even though it was so early that many of the companies that I had applied to hadn't started their interviews yet. I forgot to ask myself which aspects of the job I wouldn't like, and was too impatient to stop searching.
(Disclaimer: if anyone happens to know where I work, it's really not a bad place. It's just not a good fit for me.)
Another specific failure mode I have heard about: Choosing a college because your lover is going to the same one.
I wonder if this is indicative of unequal relationship. Why isn't the lover going to the same college as you?
Maybe they're older, so chose first.
It's more a question of 'at least one person chose a non-optimal university to be together'.