I’m dropping out! For those who know me, this may come as a big shock. For my best friends, this was expected.
But why am I doing this? What do I hope to achieve? I write in response to those questions to keep myself responsible and accountable. In the future, I can look back at what I believed at the time, and reason whether it was the correct decision for me or not knowing what I know then. Until then, a leap of faith is necessary.
This essay will be divided into three parts: why I’m leaving Penn, what I want my life to be, and my plan for my future.
I. Education
“Would you rather have a Princeton diploma without a Princeton education, or a Princeton education without a Princeton diploma? If you pause to answer, you must think signaling is pretty important.” — Bryan Caplan
When I was younger, I admired those who had fancy titles and degrees. I associated a college education with wisdom and education, as that is what my parents impressed upon me.
But I was wrong.
As a student myself, I understand now that college does not index on true learning, but on artificial metrics that are often game-able and exploited. Homework answers are AI generated or passed down from upperclassmen. Exams are cheated on, over and over again. But it is not fault of students to do so.
Munger once said, “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” Well, what’s the incentive of college? It is for the degree. A quite worthless piece of paper that certifies that a student has been educated. This incentive pushes students to the inevitable outcome of obtaining the best grades possible for that paper, regardless whether true learning has occurred.
It is a game, and it is a game I do not wish to play anymore.
I have talked to many mentors of mine who have all collectively expressed the same thought: that the college education system did not prepare them for the real-world. Several of them are Penn alums, who all told me that the courses they took at Penn did not prepare them for their career. Even my lab mentors and the PhD students within those labs has said that their undergraduate education did not help them at all.
A single data point is just that, a data point. But many data points inevitably reveals some trends that I probably should not ignore.
I consider that a third of billionaires don’t have college degrees. That some of the greatest innovators in the world had no college degrees. That the Wright brothers, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Louis Armstrong, Plato, Shakespeare all never went to college.
Environment matters a lot. If you can get by being average, you probably will. That’s what college is.
Historically, college was set up as a system to serve the industrial economy, where we needed people to become robots to do repetitive activities without complaining during the industrial revolution. A system that encourages comfort and enforces a default operational loop of waiting for an authority figure to tell you what to do next.
College is the number one killer of dreams.
I drop out in a bet to myself – that “greatness requires no credential”. That I can accelerate faster than what a college education can provide, that I can explore the world in my freedom. I drop out in search of an environment where I am forced to perform maximally.
I drop out to take responsibility for who I want to become.
Yes, it is risky. But the risk of being wrong is the price of being exceptional. In venture, outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, even if conventional wisdom (going to college) is usually correct.
Over the past year, I noticed that I had already expressed immense dissatisfaction with my educational experience. For example, here, here, here, basically the entirety of my reflection of my first year in Penn, a lot of the advice I give, a question I posed in my personal question list, and my manifesto on Build Frontiers.
In retrospect, for every educational phase I’ve been in, I have felt stifled.
Let’s revisit each phase now!
In middle school, I was not permitted to skip a grade in mathematics and science because it “isn’t fair for the other students.” For the entirety of 7th grade, I sat in the back of my math class, completing the entire lesson worksheet and homework before the class even started, and wasted away as the teacher called me out as a trouble-maker. Finally, my mom fought for me to become the first person in my district to take two math classes in 8th grade. Thanks mom. No thanks, the education system.
In high school, I was not permitted to take classes at other institutions in addition to my high school course load. Why? Because it was a school policy, and it was unfair for the other students. So instead, I spent my days playing competitive first-person shooter games for hours until I reached a near-professional level (T3 leagues) (T3 leagues). I look back to this time with great regret, thinking if I had something that challenged me as much as the video game did, where would I be now? In retrospect, I would have killed to do something cool – an internship perhaps – but I had no idea how to do that! I’m a second-generation immigrant, my parents were first-generation immigrants, and the concept of internships (and quite frankly the idea of going into the Ivy League) was a foreign concept to us all. So, I defaulted to video games instead.
In my first year of Penn, I took a mandatory writing seminar course, which required me to write an opinion article for my midterm. I wrote one on rethinking higher education and why Penn needs to change. Here’s an excerpt of my thesis:
As my first year at the University of Pennsylvania comes to a close, I find myself drawn towards what Mark Twain once said: “I’ll never let my schooling get in the way of my education.”
In agreement, I have found that the traditionally-oriented university curriculum that exists at Penn to be ineffective for my education. Penn, and most other universities, promote a traditional curriculum that can be summed up as:
- Rigid and inflexible for students to pursue the courses they are interested in.
- Incentivizes students to achieve high grades over achieving understanding.
- Often lecture-based, which deviates from the hands-on nature of real-world careers.
If the main goal of college is to prepare students for a future in their career, I daresay that the traditional college education is failing us. Instead, it is the students, who themselves scour for internships at nights, who themselves learn applicable skills over the weekends, who themselves fit in independent research time in-between the dense walls of blocked time for classes, to be the prime factor in their success.
TLDR: I critiqued Penn’s handling of many classes, including the writing seminars. My writing seminar professor privately disagreed with my thesis and gave me a B-, a score lower than my classmates who GPTed their entire essays! I highly suspected it was because I pissed my professor off, though officially it was because my writing did not meet standards. Nevermind the fact that I wrote professionally for Contrary Research at the time and was contributing extensively to this blog! My educational takeaway from that class is that original thinking is stifled in college, that consensus to the norm is encouraged, that cheating gets you where you need to be without consequences, and that college was not for me.
The final straw happened in my sophomore year at Penn. I had received back my midterm grade for my introductory finance class, where I scored better than the median. This happened despite me not attending lecture and not watching the recorded lectures. Because a cheat sheet was allowed, I copied down all the formulas I came across in the textbook and used Claude to learn how to apply them. If that was all that was needed to beat out Wharton students who breathe finance all day and night in their clubs, internship searches, and other courses, then the college education system is failing them. Then it must be failing me.
I extrapolate that this is likely to continue as I continue throughout undergrad and so on. At all stages, there will be barriers to my curiosity.
I do want to say that college was really fun. I had great times with my friends, I really like them all and I think they are all amazing people. But the FOMO I feel when I see my friends hanging out while I’m just reading or doing research made me realize that the social pressures of college is difficult to push back on.
And that’s important because when I think back to my days in high school, my biggest regret wasn’t having more fun and messing around with friends, it was not pushing myself. And I’m just scared that this will happen again. I want to not be able to look back and say “I could have done more. I had more potential.” I lived with this regret before.
And I worry that university is teaching me things that can easily be self-taught (like mathematics) but neglect the knowledge that actually matter (how to do great work, how to manifest ideas into reality). I worry that if I continue, I wouldn’t know what I don’t know.
The right path must be walked, even if alone. Intelligence is in short supply, but courage is even rare to find.
So, I decided to quit all together.
II. Life
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” - Henry David Thoreau
The day someone was born is the most important day of their life. It was their beginning. And everyone alive goes through this process.
But the second most important day for anybody is the day you realize why you were born. And too many people live through life on autopilot, following societal pressures, and realize that what they’ve been chasing after this entire time is not how they actually want to live their life.
After four (or more) years of “education”, people venture into the real-world and work. They work until the day they retire and die. That’s not what I want to live for.
So what do I want to live for? What do I want in my life? What are the great things to work on? What am I interested in?
People only do work that they are interested in. Do you think Shakespeare regretted and feared writing his literature? Of course not. He was having fun, that’s why he was so good.
Right now (2024), my gut instinct is to become:
- A great engineer and builder
- A great writer and speaker
The end goal is to be able to become a founder and do what matters for the world. Engineering helps with product. Writing helps with distribution.
A question some may have for me is, why not work on becoming a founder now? Why not continue Nanoneuro?
First, I think Nanoneuro will hit eventual scaling issues that I honestly have no idea how to tackle. Millions, if not billions, have been invested in this certain problem over the course of decades, and it is still ongoing. I do not believe that I will be the one to solve that. I have told many investors that I am not raising, and that is because of this. I don’t intend to squander valuable money when I don’t need it. I don’t intend to raise for clout or status. I intend to raise when I need to raise.
Second, I don’t want to build a lifestyle startup in the “social entrepreneurship” space, make five figures passively, and call it a day. Honestly, this should just be renamed as “social distribution work” because most social entrepreneurship “founders” are simply redistributing societal resources, but distinctly, they are not creating value.
I do startups because I want to create generational companies that define entire eras. I specifically look up to Nvidia and SpaceX because my calling is in deeptech. I believe that the deeptech era has come.
Low barrier opportunities have been abundant in almost every industry using software, which is inherently a low-barrier engineering skillset. But this strategy has been sufficiently exploited – the low-hanging fruits have been eaten. Only hard problems exist now, and hard problems can only be worked on with sufficient experience.
This is why the average age of successful unicorn founders is trending upwards - experience is now much more valuable. Young founders cannot possibly have the necessary experience and perspective to solve these hardtech problems.
And I anecdotally believe that generational companies can only begin with a generational founder. There’s one anecdote that I always think about, on Don Valentine and Jensen Huang. According to Jensen, when he first pitched to Valentine, he failed miserably. But his boss at LSI Logic advised Valentine to “give this kid money and figure out if it’s going to work.” And so, Valentine decided to invest in Nvidia – on faith in Jensen as a person rather than the specifics of Nvidia’s business plan.
The founder needs to embody the definition of greatness.
That’s why I drop out – not to continue to work on my startup but to learn, gather experience, and work on becoming a generational founder.
Working backwards, how do I become a great founder? My answer is simple: become the greatest engineer and writer I can be. To become not just a thinker but a thinker-doer manifested in one person. Engineering will help me build product. Writing will help me build distribution. “The first time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution.” I want to focus on both.
I think the most obvious path is to becoming a good engineer is to get really good at the fundamentals. That’ll start with a lot of textbook reading, later tinkering, and finally internship stints. My belief is that knowledge is the key driver of wealth accumulation.
But I don’t want to limit myself to just mechanical or electrical or computer science. From what I’ve written before, my belief is that the frontiers in this world can only be approached and solved by those with generalist skillsets who are inspired by solutions from multiple domains.
From there, my pursuit towards learning and understanding the world through engineering will likely lead to a challenge at the frontier, a problem so compelling and impactful that it drives me to solve it.
I do acknowledge that impact is an overused word. Everyone around me in college wants to have impact, but few people truly want to do so. Many people are just unserious, and I want to become serious at this. At learning and becoming a good engineer. Dropping out will provide me the focus necessary for me to achieve that.
For writing, I’ll just continue writing! But I will focus more on doing valuable deepdives and putting well-researched, original ideas out into the world.
III. Plan
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” – Benjamin Franklin
I hope why I’m dropping out makes sense now. To those who care about me: I only hope that you support my decision. I’m not dropping out because I just hate learning; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. I think school is too slow for me, and I think school is just not the right fit! Learning should be fun and play should feel like learning. That is my belief.
The main fields I want to begin getting good at as an engineer is in electrical engineering, mathematics, and computer science. I already have a solid background in mathematics (2nd year of undergraduate) and computer science (2nd year of undergraduate). I’m completely unfamiliar with electrical engineering though.
To begin with, here are the textbooks I plan to work through:
- A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics
- An Infinitely Large Napkin
- Linear Algebra and Differential Equations by Strang
- Information Theory by David Mackay
- Optimization theory by Stanford University
- The Art of Electronics
- Practical Electronics for Inventors
- Introduction to Probability by Blitzstein & Hwang
I aim to approach a first year graduate level for all these subjects within a year. Dropping out later, I’ll move onto mechanical engineering and bioengineering and the other subjects that are lower on my priority list.
In a year, I’ll plan on working at various companies. Island hopping is the likely strategy to most optimally be exposed to a wide variety of roles, thinkers, and systems.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to read and write a lot. If a book every two weeks isn’t too optimistic, I’ll select a list of 30 books to go through over a year. I’ll filter by my interests, which are currently on history, biographies, culture, religion, and world economics.
To write, I will probably join an undisclosed firm as a Researcher-in-Residence. The focus here is to write good things: in-depth, thoughtful, and original pieces. One idea I’m experimenting with is to become a librarian: keeping track of ideas that float around in the world, documenting possibilities within the frontier, and exploring niches that I think more people should understand.
A piece of advice that someone from BoxGroup told me is to have a list of mentors that I should keep in touch with. I already have thought about some mentors to keep in contact with to keep me reliable. I’ll set bi-monthly meetings with them to let them shape my progress.
The Medici family famously patronized Galileo Galilei in pursuit of scientific achievement. To create works without immediate economic concerns, to focus on my craft, I thank my patrons who have become my first believers.