ChristianKl comments on Open thread, Jul. 18 - Jul. 24, 2016 - Less Wrong
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What are the differences between the 'big names' of higher education, in comparison to other places?
For example, I often hear about MIT, Oxford, and to a lesser extent, Cambridge. Either there's some sort of self-selection, or do graduates from there have better prospects than graduates of 'University of X, YZ'?
In a little bit of unintended self-reflection I noticed that I have a strange binary way of thinking of higher education. It feels that if I don't go to one of the top n, my effort is wasted. Not sure why.
I'm just becoming somewhat paranoid regarding the real world after reading HPMOR because I always get a 'how much do I really know?' feeling. I'm not sure how my impressions were formed and I better double-check how well does the ideas in my mind reflect the real-world truth but at the same time I'm not even sure what's a reliable indicator.
Post-high education LWers, do you think the place you studied at had a significant effect on your future prospects?
What do you actually want to do with your life? There are careers like politics where personal connection that are gathered during university years are very important.
There are other careers such as starting a startup where personal connections with high status people might not be central and a lot of the YC founders don't have them.
Why "either or"?
I went to Melbourne University and did an exchange program to UCSD. So I have comparison. I think the distribution of the quality of teaching is sufficiently narrow that it should not play a major factor..
Depending on the job and your part of the world, personal connection might be a very important factor in carer success. It is more likely that you will would gain more, better personal connection in better university.
Wait what? How are you supposed to meet your co-founder / early employees without connections? College is like the ideal place to meet people to start start-ups with.
Meeting a cofounder is useful and college can help with that but I don't think that you have a huge advantage from being at Oxford compared to being at any other decent university.
Still not sure.
My English sucks, and I should stop thinking in a binary format.