2015-09-14, 20:10
How Running a Startup Taught Me More Than School Ever Could
I just turned 19 and started my second year at the University of Pennsylvania; since the beginning of my freshman year, I’ve been running a startup called ThirdEye--a product that empowers visually impaired persons by telling them what’s in front of them--with a team of four Penn students. At the very beginning, ThirdEye was nothing more than a small project that some of my new college friends and I built in a weekend hackathon. And so, just like all the other freshmen at Penn, I focused (or at least tried to focus) most of my time on schoolwork. The problem was that I was working on writing seminar assignments that required more busy work than legitimate thinking and submitting labs that thousands of other students had done before me. Now I’m not suggesting the classes were “easy.” But they were most certainly unfulfilling, especially knowing that “earning” an “A” or a “B” didn’t actually mean that I knew the material better than anyone else (it just meant that I was a good test taker); and that even if I earned the high grade, I probably couldn’t actually apply the theoretical “skills” later in life. By the way, this isn’t one of Penn’s idiosyncrasies: it’s a demonstration of our broken higher education system.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rajatbhageri...uture-tech
I just turned 19 and started my second year at the University of Pennsylvania; since the beginning of my freshman year, I’ve been running a startup called ThirdEye--a product that empowers visually impaired persons by telling them what’s in front of them--with a team of four Penn students. At the very beginning, ThirdEye was nothing more than a small project that some of my new college friends and I built in a weekend hackathon. And so, just like all the other freshmen at Penn, I focused (or at least tried to focus) most of my time on schoolwork. The problem was that I was working on writing seminar assignments that required more busy work than legitimate thinking and submitting labs that thousands of other students had done before me. Now I’m not suggesting the classes were “easy.” But they were most certainly unfulfilling, especially knowing that “earning” an “A” or a “B” didn’t actually mean that I knew the material better than anyone else (it just meant that I was a good test taker); and that even if I earned the high grade, I probably couldn’t actually apply the theoretical “skills” later in life. By the way, this isn’t one of Penn’s idiosyncrasies: it’s a demonstration of our broken higher education system.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rajatbhageri...uture-tech