Where to go

Occasionally I read over essays by Paul Graham. As a friend says, “I don’t agree with all of his conclusions, but he brings up interesting points which is more important”.

Here’s a recent essay of Paul’s:

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

The basic outline is this: Paul invests in startups. He’s found that attendance of a famous university is not correlated with an entrepreneur’s success. He suggests this is because all schools have a mixture of students (not everyone at Harvard is a genius or hardworking and even if they are this does not spell instant success) so the specific college choice is not crucial. In some ways, I agree with this. I’m currently sitting on the SUNY Albany campus, my undergrad home. It’s significantly less prestigious than my current home at BU, but the bottom line is, attending a state school cost me a fraction of what many students pay at private ones and it has gotten me to where I want to be thus far. I often think about the irreplaceable experiences I had at Albany and wonder who I would be without them. However, had I attended another school, I likely would have had other equally irreplaceable experiences. When I expressed dismay over graduating and moving on, a friend said, “But you’re going to a place that you will miss as much as this”. Prob the best advice I’ve received.