Nov 1, 2024
I wrote this to answer a question I had when I was 17—how to choose a college? But I think if you substitute college with another organization or place that you will stay for a few years, some questions still work.
Considerations
What directly impacts your experience most is who you spend time with. So you want to know whether you can have the best sort of peers. Since you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, the quality of your peer is likely to set the upper limit of who you are and what you can do. Therefore when you are learning about the options, your answer better be a bit more concrete than “These are the smartest people in the country”. A good answer might be “The folks here are generally smart, ambitious, and hardworking. Judging by those personal websites I found online, a lot of them enjoy engineering and innovating.”
You also have to figure out what the environment speaks to you. Because by and large, this will determine where you end up when you don’t see a beacon (yet) and go with the flow. Paul Graham discussed this extensively in his essay Cities and Ambitions, that each city is a center of an ambition, and it speaks to you when you live in that city, for example, in New York the message is “You should be richer”, in San Francisco it’s “You should be more powerful”. I think there are something like this on smaller scales, Colleges and Ambitions, Companies and Ambitions, or more generally, any collective people of similar properties have some ambition. Another way to put this is, “location affects the vibe you are infected with.” To be more concise, your environment might tell you “You should get better grades at school, and publish as much academic papers as possible.”, it could also tell you “You should strive to solve real world problems by acquiring useful skills.” The influence of environment is so profound I won’t dare to explain in a few words, but I think if you want to learn more you can start with the psychology concept “priming effect”.
You will also want to learn about the perimeters of the idea space you can explore [1] according to the system. This might be important because if you want to think about freedom and human rights, it’s unwise to be in a place where voices can’t be heard. And fighting the system is in general a waste of time and attention.
You also have to figure out what miscellaneous you have to deal with, such as some random Chinese colleges might ask you to run 85KM on the campus running track if you opted for a PE class that semester, or there’s only hot water supply between 3 PM-11 PM, etc. These are the kinds of pettiness that could break your time into pieces if you are not careful (or technical enough [2]), so you might want to know them in advance to avoid being caught off-guard and feeling frustrated.
You might want to know how intense your primary job there will be. If you are not 100% sure that is something you will commit to in the next 10 years, then you should be open-minded and allocate some energy to be spent regularly in another idea space that piques your interest.
Together with the previous advice, this yields the amount of long, uninterrupted time blocks you can have each week. Paul Graham calls schedule which consists of arrangements like this a maker’s schedule.
To get your maker’s schedule, pull out your weekly calendar, cross out the blocks where you have to go check in (otherwise you fail the class), take tests, and the minimum amount of time you need to work so you can graduate (such as writing a bachelor thesis), you get your maker’s schedule.
I think having a maker’s schedule is highly underrated, because these consecutive time blocks are de facto when most personal growth happens, most codes and essays written, most interests explored, most books read, most skills acquired, etc.
You might be very passionate about your major when you first start, but when your interest misaligns with your major somehow (more than 90% of college graduates have careers that are completely unrelated to their majors), the only times you can work on yourself are the times from the resulting maker’s schedule. I think you should try to extend and protect your maker’s schedule as much as possible.
Questions to Ask
To reflect on your current environment or options, I think here are some good questions you can use to interview people.
Who should you talk to?
I think the best people to interview in terms of collecting these information are those you know are very good at something, so they have a good idea about how good their peers are. They are also experienced, candid, and sincere, so they have a good grasp of the environment and don’t make things up when they don’t have a good answer [3].
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Notes
[1] By explore, I mean to “actively engage in discussions with different people online and offline without worrying that you’d be canceled even if you are careful.” An example of doing something you “shouldn’t” be touching is having online discussions around a dictator’s fears.
[2] You can use virtual GPS to hack the system sometimes, but you have to be technical enough.
[3] I had the experience of being introduced to a major at a college major fair (open day) by a freshman who didn’t know what he was talking about. He makes things up when he doesn’t know.
