Finishing a Year of College in 10 Weeks

Blindness and bad memory are social constructs. Stay with me here. They only exist because we collectively believe they do. That sounds impossible, and it’s exactly that belief that really limits people. If humans can see with echolocation and an average guy can train a world class memory, then I think common wisdom really underestimates our ability as humans. I’m going to test that idea on the pace of my education.

In my experience, college is extremely inefficient. If my goal is to gain knowledge and learn to think, then lectures are a poor solution. I’m limited by the pace of the professor, their ability as a teacher, and their rate of speech.

Meanwhile, world class institutions are posting all their material online. The very best people in their fields are posting their courses in a format where the only limit is my ability to consume it. Knowing that, it’s silly that I depend on (and pay loads for) lectures, and I think removing that inefficiency will really speed up my rate of learning.

To test that hypothesis, I’m going “self teach” a year’s worth of school in 10 weeks.

Now, there are several things that make this possible. First, Computer Science is uniquely suited to self teaching. No other discipline is so easy to experiment with and has so much freely available information. Second, I personally learn my better on my own. I can explore questions at my pace and experiment in a meandering way. Many people learn much better in a classroom, and I’m definitely not one of them. Finally, I’m very motivated, unusually so. I came to college expecting to be challenged, and if the school won’t do it, then I will.

I admit this may go quite badly. I might end up just stressing the hell out of myself. This is really just an experiment, and I’ll adjust it if it’s not working well for me. Also, I realize there’s much more to a college education than the material from classes. Relationships with professors and peers are the biggest advantage of going to college, and those things are much harder to get in this sort of experiment.

In college, you’ll usually average 4 classes at a time over 30 weeks of instruction every year. 4 * 30 = 120 class weeks per year. On my own, I’ve managed to finish about 2 class weeks of material per day, so at that pace a year’s worth should take 60 days. I’ll give myself 1 day off every week, so that brings it to 10 weeks. This ends up being 3x the speed of the traditional rate of instruction.

Details

I picked classes by basically finding the things I want to learn most at the moment. They range from upper division CS to basic stats. Here they are:

• Algorithms: Design and Analysis (part 2)
• Compilers
• Programming Languages
• Automata
• Nand2Tetris
• Embedded Systems
• Circuits and Electronics (part 2, part 3)
• Artificial Intelligence
• Introduction to Probability
• Mathematics for Computer Science

Total: 126 class weeks

A student on the quarter system will take 12 classes, a student on the semester system will take 8. Since I’m taking a mix of both, I’m taking 10.

I’ll begin on January 11th and complete on March 20th. If I complete 120 weeks of instruction, I’ll consider the experiment a success. Most of the classes are on EdX and Coursera, which have tests online. For classes that don’t, I’ll take the tests on paper and have a friend grade them. I’m happy to post them online for accountability. I’m also happy to document my experiment in other ways, so feel free to suggest anything.

As it is, I’ll just try to work through 1 week of 2 classes every day. Completing a week means watching the lectures and completing the assignments and projects for that week. Towards the beginning, I’ll aim to finish three weeks to make some wiggle r0om for myself when the material gets harder.

Why?

The goal is to challenge myself and to challenge common wisdom. Richard Hamming said it well in his fantastic talk: “ Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former [over a lifetime].” If that’s true, then working at 1/3 the rate I could be is crippling me. Of course, there’s a ton of other factors involved, but on this front I’m not doing my best, and college isn’t allowing me to do so. Mark Twain said “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” I don’t want to let my schooling interfere with mine any longer.