http://rejection.posterous.com/ - this is one person's experience with it. I agree that sometimes it sounds iffy, but I think it's useful for people who have that problem. When you say it sounds 'scary' do you mean scary to try or scary what could happen if everyone tried it?
By the way, you sound a lot smarter than the average 16-year-old. (I speak as one who also used to tell people online my age at the age of 16, in the hope I'd get such compliments :) )
Intelligence is notoriously hard to quantify, and I am slightly insulted by your generalization. Perhaps I know very unusual sixteen year olds, but I think maturity would be a better word to use in this context.
This would be great next year, when I take my gap year between high-school and uni. Although I must say, just seeing the results will be amazing in itself - I can't wait until you release the details of the games and such you used, and how well they worked. (I'm taking from your previous replies to comments that you intend on this, for now at least.)
Are there age limits? I saw on the application it asks about degrees, employment etc... which, as a 16-year-old, I don't have yet. But I think I could really benefit from this if it's still running in 2012.
I'm not going to say this is a brilliant idea, because I'm sure it's not original at all - but actually doing something about it, bringing this to life - that's brilliant. I'm sure it takes a hell of a lot of planning, effort and money: so thank you.
I'm really hoping this is the start of something that will grow, because the sense of pure awesome that filled me when I read it is something I don't want to have to fall down.
Oh, side note, I had to go and look up 'rejection therapy' - it sounded iffy. After researching, it sounds scary and iffy. Has anyone here tried it before?
Based on what little research I did, there seems to be a lot of variation in how iffy it looks. Some models of rejection therapy would probably help me, others look pointless or counter productive. So essentially... good thing they are giving a free test for their program.
I took an interesting computer science course in high school... Grade 11 was exactly what you would expect from a comp-sci course, and by the end of it all of us were fairly fluent in two languages, but the second year was quite different. In a group of about five students, we were given problems to solve (like how to delete a node from a binary tree and rebalance it), had to develop an algorithm, and then learn how to implement it in a language none of us had used before. Our teacher knew that we could all follow instructions and learn from him fairly well. But the hardest part of programming for real is that you are eventually going to be in a situation where you cannot finish a project on your own, and every single person is going to have to be committed enough to learn a language and get their code in on time or you will fail.
We were a fairly typical group of high school students, so you can probably guess how successful we were at first. I was the only one who cared about learning the material, and did not have much I could do to get the others to cooperate.(being two years younger never helps) Eventually, I just had to make it work by studying harder, and telling everyone in the group that if they did not finish their part a week in advance, they were on their own. The people who didn't work hard failed, and those of us who were left eventually got much better at coordinating and working together. I don't think teamwork ever gets easy, all you can really do is give people an incentive to work hard and take up the slack for anyone who doesn't.
I don't know where else you could take a course like mine, but it definitely helped :p
I thought 'PERFECT' then I remembered I live half a world away.
Chances of a course by correspondence?
I've always thought going through a course with some of my friends would be a really good exercise.
Test the limits of their free travel offer ;p
This site is based on reddit tech. I joined hacker news, which is related, made my first comment, which lost karma. My karma was at that point slightly below zero. And guess what happened at that point. nobody saw any of my comments from that point forward, because I was below reading threshold, which meant also that my karma was stuck (I think it was -4). I checked, by logging off and looking for my own comments. I fixed the problem by creating a new account, which gained karma steadily.
But what kind of system is one which permanently silences someone who happens to go negative on his first try? Reflection on this soured me toward hacker news and I eventually left, haven't been back. The obvious fix is to start people off with, say, 50 karma points. Give people a chance, don't silence them if their first comment displeases somebody. Which I don't see anybody implementing.
Right now, I have karma below 200. I want to build up karma because I don't want to have to create a new account.
Frankly, though, I don't care for karma. I think the main use of karma is to prevent flame wars, because obviously, if you say something really offensive, your karma will drop off a cliff and go negatively quickly. That's about it. I don't think it is otherwise terribly useful.
It is intended to automatically filter trolls, but being locked out after one bad comment does seem harsh. I would not worry about managing your karma now though... It would take a significant series of widely detested posts for you to be stuck making a new account.
I tried to make the same point, by way of a joke (I wrote that the seminar on Xenu and thetans was mandatory). Lost karma, deleted the joke before I lost too much karma. If I lose karma on this I'll delete this comment too.
I deliberately condition myself to not be afraid of losing karma. Trying to strike a balance between accepting other peoples opinions and listening to my own judgement is difficult. But when too many people delete anything which is unpopular, a sites content becomes monolithic.
Although since it was an easy to misinterpret joke, my karma policies may be irrelevant. Feel free to downvote.
Yes, it's looking like I'd have to do that ... a ten week block is a lot.
Is the ten weeks thing designed to select for college students?
Who knows... If they do not get enough responses I expect them to change the length. They probably just wrote down everything they ideally would like to have time to teach, and figured out how long they thought it would take at a breakneck pace,
It sounds fun... Hopefully they will do it again at some point in the future when I no longer find myself obliged to work all summer to pay tuition.
Yeah, I really should be saving up over the summer as well. But then again... It will probably only get more difficult to go in the future. They might start charging, I will probably have a full time job, and an apartment to deal with.
Definitely all-consuming.
Sounds good to me... I cannot say that I have ever been involved in something this long that could take up nearly all of my time, but I tend to do well under pressure.
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Doing it at the last minute is never going to work, is it?
Sigh. I suppose at some point I need to get over my superstition that it's somehow more efficient to finish things the night before.
I worked the same way until I started doing correspondence courses. With nobody to hassle me, no classes to hand stuff in at, and no peers I had to learn to motivate myself and follow a schedule fast.
I am motivated well by deadlines as well, but its amazing how much easier schoolwork is when you actually choose when to do it. instead of cramming in a sleep deprived state for the night before, you can break it up into easier pieces when you are most alert. Hopefully these newfound skills will carry over when I start university...