Paul Graham - Essays

Of course college students have to think about more than just learning. There are also two practical problems to consider: jobs, and graduate school.

In theory a liberal education is not supposed to supply job training. But everyone knows this is a bit of a fib. Hackers at every college learn practical skills, and not by accident.

What you should learn to get a job depends on the kind you want. If you want to work in a big company, learn how to hack Blub on Windows. If you want to work at a cool little company or research lab, you'll do better to learn Ruby on Linux. And if you want to start your own company, which I think will be more and more common, master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse.

There is not a direct correlation between the skills you should learn in college and those you'll use in a job. You should aim slightly high in college.

In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world. They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.

The programs you write in classes differ in three critical ways from the ones you'll write in the real world: they're small; you get to start from scratch; and the problem is usually artificial and predetermined. In the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, and often require you to figure out what the problem is before you can solve it.

You don't have to wait to leave (or even enter) college to learn these skills. If you want to learn how to deal with existing code, for example, you can contribute to open-source projects. The sort of employer you want to work for will be as impressed by that as good grades on class assignments.

In existing open-source projects you don't get much practice at the third skill, deciding what problems to solve. But there's nothing to stop you starting new projects of your own. And good employers will be even more impressed with that.

What sort of problem should you try to solve? One way to answer that is to ask what you need as a user. For example, I stumbled on a good algorithm for spam filtering because I wanted to stop getting spam. Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow prevented my inbox from filling up. I tend to use my inbox as a todo list. But that's like using a screwdriver to open bottles; what one really wants is a bottle opener.

What about grad school? Should you go? And how do you get into a good one?

In principle, grad school is professional training in research, and you shouldn't go unless you want to do research as a career. And yet half the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research. I didn't go to grad school to become a professor. I went because I wanted to learn more.

So if you're mainly interested in hacking and you go to grad school, you'll find a lot of other people who are similarly out of their element. And if half the people around you are out of their element in the same way you are, are you really out of your element?

There's a fundamental problem in "computer science," and it surfaces in situations like this. No one is sure what "research" is supposed to be. A lot of research is hacking that had to be crammed into the form of an academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication.

So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science. The whole field is uncomfortable in its own skin. So the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you from going to grad school. Just be warned you'll have to do a lot of stuff you don't like.

Number one will be your dissertation. Almost everyone hates their dissertation by the time they're done with it. The process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a cake made out of whole wheat flour and baked for twelve hours. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors.

But thousands before you have suffered through writing a dissertation. And aside from that, grad school is close to paradise. Many people remember it as the happiest time of their lives. And nearly all the rest, including me, remember it as a period that would have been, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation. [5]

The danger with grad school is that you don't see the scary part upfront. PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several years of classes. So by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation, you're already several years in. If you quit now, you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won't like that idea. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure.

On the whole, grad school is probably better than most alternatives. You meet a lot of smart people, and your glum procrastination will at least be a powerful common bond. And of course you have a PhD at the end. I forgot about that. I suppose that's worth something.

The greatest advantage of a PhD (besides being the union card of academia, of course) may be that it gives you some baseline confidence. For example, the Honeywell thermostats in my house have the most atrocious UI. My mother, who has the same model, diligently spent a day reading the user's manual to learn how to operate hers. She assumed the problem was with her. But I can think to myself "If someone with a PhD in computer science can't understand this thermostat, it must be badly designed."

If you still want to go to grad school after this equivocal recommendation, I can give you solid advice about how to get in. A lot of my friends are CS professors now, so I have the inside story about admissions. It's quite different from college. At most colleges, admissions officers decide who gets in. For PhD programs, the professors do. And they try to do it well, because the people they admit are going to be working for them.

Apparently only recommendations really matter at the best schools. Standardized tests count for nothing, and grades for little. The essay is mostly an opportunity to disqualify yourself by saying something stupid. The only thing professors trust is recommendations, preferably from people they know. [6]

So if you want to get into a PhD program, the key is to impress your professors. And from my friends who are professors I know what impresses them: not merely trying to impress them. They're not impressed by students who get good grades or want to be their research assistants so they can get into grad school. They're impressed by students who get good grades and want to be their research assistants because they're genuinely interested in the topic.

So the best thing you can do in college, whether you want to get into grad school or just be good at hacking, is figure out what you truly like. It's hard to trick professors into letting you into grad school, and impossible to trick problems into letting you solve them. College is where faking stops working. From this point, unless you want to go work for a big company, which is like reverting to high school, the only way forward is through doing what you love.

[1] No one seems to have minded, which shows how unimportant the Arpanet (which became the Internet) was as late as 1984.

[2] This is why, when I became an employer, I didn't care about GPAs. In fact, we actively sought out people who'd failed out of school. We once put up posters around Harvard saying "Did you just get kicked out for doing badly in your classes because you spent all your time working on some project of your own? Come work for us!" We managed to find a kid who had been, and he was a great hacker.