I'm actually not sure what to put there now. I guess I'm kind of a drop out for the time being.

Here's a graph summary of what I've been spending my time on: http://files.dangrover.com/howispentmyyear_draft_annotated.p...

(Later, I'm going to normalize the data and run correlations with sales/traffic, and go totally Tufte on the graph)

I was in school, then I took a sanctioned perfectly-normal break to work at a company making iPhone games in Palo Alto (most students at my school leave every 6 months for an internship). But I was pretty miserable at this company, and realized that I was making roughly the same off of my business (which was <= part-time).

I was trying to follow the traditional path, mostly out of fear. But the arguments for why you should rack up lots of debt in school and let yourself be taken advantage of by employers who pay you much less than you're worth in exchange for this "experience" or some such started making a lot less sense.

It seems like 80% of my time at NU was just spent on meaningless crap that I put up with because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't get amazing grades and impress some employer. I could have been taking more challenging and diverse courses if it weren't for that. The urgency behind this kind of went away when I realized that I have some sort of fundamental mental block when it comes to the idea of being a "good employee." And that maybe I shouldn't care so much about having a traditional career when I had another path that was getting more and more feasible by the minute.

So, I dunno, I'd like to go back to school, even do some research (I've gotten really into programming language design/implementation lately with a side project). But the most important thing is being happy. And for the first time in many years, I am.

Hmm, I think I've gone and made it more douchey than what I had there. Back to the drawing board.

"I could have been taking more challenging and diverse courses if it weren't for that."

I find this to be the single biggest flaw with our current education system.

For too many employers, your entire educational experience is reduced to a scalar between 0 and 4. Even diving has a "degree of difficulty" in addition to how well you executed the dive. Shouldn't education have something similar?

I think to fix the education system, you have to fix the employment and hiring systems first. Unfortunately, a lot of people view college as a 4-year job-preparation institution instead of an institute of higher learning.

Then again, you could view the fact that more and more people are starting their own businesses as a potential solution. We're realizing that you don't need to wait to get "experience" or education, so if you can move faster than a traditional job or college, why not do so?