Just how greedy some professors can be.

Like the one that had a publishing deal with Pearson. He wrote his own textbook, charged $700 for it, then made you remove parts from the book so it made used copies of the book worthless.

That when actually challenged I couldn’t justify eating meat. It was just a part of a long conversation with another meat eating woman in completely unrelated majors.

Honestly that sort of thing is one of the most valuable parts of college imo. I was in a place dedicated to learning and thinking, surrounded by people also dedicated to it and it meant that I had a lot of deep intellectual conversations. Those years didn’t just give me a career, they molded me into someone genuinely educated

Computer science students multiple years into the course think I’m a hacker for using the linux terminal

It has been proven that each mathematical reasoning system* either has a statement that cannot be proven true or false, or a statement that can be proven both true or false. In simpler terms, it has been proven that we can’t prove everything.

Gödels incompleteness theorem if anyone wants to look it up.

• only holds for reasoning systems that can reason about numbers

That all the shit I was told about making 60k out of college and doubling it in 4 years, how I would need college to get a cushy desk job, how without college I would never afford a house or a car, that my loans would be paid off in 10 years or forgiven in 20… All of that was a fucking lie.

Colleges will happily take 80 grand from teenagers and give them absolutely nothing for it.

I learned women actually don’t have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people’s lives in present day. And that it’s about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don’t help or silence victims.

I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren’t their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don’t know people’s values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you’d otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don’t know before you ask.

I learned that humor isn’t always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an “ironically bigoted” joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt “ironic” racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an “elite” engineering college.

I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.

How low the expectations are for a putatively “adult” level of education

You can calculate how long a pencil can stand on its tip before falling using quantum physics.

Basically a version of this was on our freshman accelerated physics final, and no one got it right so our professor happily explained it to us the next day.

It was pretty much the same as is described here.

https://thephysicsvirtuosi.com/posts/old/how-long-can-you-balance-a-quantum-pencil/

Higher education is a waste of money for the vast majority of degrees, even STEM ones.

Whether or not an irregular verb retains its irregularity depends largely on how much it is used in everyday life. If it’s a common word, it’s more likely to stay irregular, because we’re frequently reminded of the “correct” form. If it’s a rare word, the irregularity tends to disappear over time because we simply forget. That’s why “to be” couldn’t be more irregular (it’s used enough to retain its forms) and the past participle of “to prove” is slowly becoming regular “proved” (it’s rare enough to be forgotten).

yes i like language very much

Edit: typo

That I spent years developing proficiency in my language and expanding my vocabulary to get accepted, only to be told to write simplified English in journalism school. Then they doubled down in my business classes to write for a 6th grade education and those who don’t speak natively.

One of the most accurate and successful theories in physics contains the single worst prediction and isn’t mathematically rigorous at all.

Doing calculations with it feels like doing vibes based maths, and you spend a lot of time doing things like: “oops divided by zero guess I’ll cancel it out by multiplying by zero” and it works.

That I am way stupider than I thought I was. No seriously, constantly failing and seeing how little I actually know made me question my life choices.

At a certain point, you need to be force which pushes you forward. I saw a lot of intelligent people fail because they no longer had the external stimulus to go to class.

Also, it is easier to manipulate people in positions of power, but you have to understand how they think and are rewarded. There is a reason why a lot of liberal arts education is focused on having people understand others.

Also, the liberal arts education of a century ago was basically a degree which was intended to make managers. Along with it, the extra-curricular activities were an important part of the education, but just what happened in class.

That teaching isn’t the point. It’s getting research grants or funding. So much energy was spent on that. Students came 2nd.