…from a fifteen-year old. I found this telling:
For now Andraka is going to continue promoting his breakthrough test, which he says will “completely replace the ELISA test” within a few years. He’d like to explore how to put multiple antibodies on a single test strip to check for a variety of agents in the bloodstream. And what about the rest of high school? Andraka says “hopefully” he will finish North County High School in Glenburnie, Md., but if he does form a company to commercialize the nanotube test strip, he will put high school on hold.
A young man after Peter Thiel’s heart. Some of the most talented people we have have no need for formal schooling. Speaking of which, thoughts on parents who public-school their kids.
Last year, the Intel Science Fair was won by a 10th-grader in my hometown. Her project involved developing a semiconductor nanoparticle that kills cancer cells when exposed to specific wavelengths of light.
A few months earlier, I tried to persuade the Space Frontier Foundation that it should support the creation of a world-class science fair for space. Bob Werb shot the idea down on the spot. He told me science fairs were old-fashioned, dying, and never resulted in anything of value.
Stupid kid should be in school learning Tolerance and Diversity. Socialization!
The students hold elections for student government at the U, where when elected, they get to hand out the swag of the Segregated Student Fees in the manner of Chicago Aldermen hiring their cousins as city workers.
Occasionally, students run on a kind of political platform, and rarely, on a kind of cynical-whimsical-humor platform. A group of candidates for student government from the College of Engineering did such a thing some years back.
One platform plank was just as engineering students (who come from one of the most culturally diverse groups on campus, but that is another story) had to take Tolerance and Diversity (called Ethnic Studies), Liberal Arts students would be required to take ECE 430 Probability and Random Signals as a breadth requirement to broaden their education.
A second platform plank was that students in majors without clearly identifiable career prospects would be required to co-enroll in the Diesel Driving School, Sun Prairie, Wisconsin as a backstop, so they would be at least guaranteed of a job driving an over-the-road (OTR) Diesel truck when they graduated so they could pay their student loans..
I don’t know if I should laugh or cry. Maybe both.
I disagree with Thiel. If anything the opposite has been happening. In average technology entrepreneurs today have more education than in the past. Elon Musk may be known as a Stanford dropout but he has two bachelor degrees in business and physics that he got somewhere else. Larry Page and Sergey Brin may be PhD dropouts but they still have bachelor and masters degrees. Jeff Bezos has a bachelors degree in EE and CS. If you compare that with the previous generation which is filled with dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Larry Ellison things are a lot different. The fact is you learn a lot of things in university which make it more likely that you will be able to develop your products successfully. You also get to experience an environment filled with people which have an engineering or business streak which may end up as your business partners. While it is not necessary to have a masters degree or PhD spending those three years getting a bachelors degree in a technological, business or related field like mathematics and physics is still IMO worth it. A lot of clients will not even take you seriously if they know you are under 20 much less under age so you are better off honing your knowledge and skills during that time. Companies hate to spend time and money training employees especially when there is high unemployment and there is an abundance of skills laborers. You may not have a business plan or clients yet. Also there are more places to get an education than MIT and Stanford which don’t break the bank quite as badly.
Peter Thiel is paying people to drop out of college but he still got degrees in philosophy and law from Stanford. If I wanted to fund a technology business I wouldn’t be spending my time getting degrees in fluff like that much less in an expensive place like Stanford. IMO Thiel simply did not have a clue and still does not understand why colleges exist.
Boy, are you in the wrong place . . .
Seriously, now, the one and perhaps only way I would second this idea of School as a Bad Idea for the Truly Gifted or some such thing is Feynman’s remark that graduate school spells the end of physics. His knock is that everyone (in physics) goes to the same grad schools teaching the same mathematical framework, which means no one tries to reinvent anything anymore and come up with novel tools (tools being theoretical and mathematical constructs for representing physical reality) as Feynman did back in the day.
I second everything that Godzilla is saying — maybe, just maybe, grad school beyond the Master’s is redundant and maybe even stifling for the gifted and motivated student, but undergrad degrees in STEM disciplines still lay the foundation.
Simon Singh, in his book on Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s, mentions how most all advancements in mathematics are made by guys before or during grad school. Humanity now relies on genetic recombination to create brains that already contain the solutions – the prof’s are just cultivators, neurological gardeners making sure these genius brains are properly watered and that the fruit is picked when ripe.
Some parents tell their kids to “look it up.” His parents told him to “figure it out.” I think his parents had the better approach. When you look something up, you’re accepting the standard “approved” or published answer. When you figure it out on your own, you learn a lot more because you’re actively seeking the answer, trying new approaches and, in this example, learning the scientific method.
Something tells me this young man is going places. His motivation (having an uncle die of pancreatic cancer) may have resulted in something that will save thousands of lives every year. Using the same approach, it could revolutionize the early detection of many types of cancer. His approach is so simple and inexpensive that it might be part of a standard physical within a few years. Who know, perhaps existing detection techniques like mammograms will be largely obsolete except perhaps to confirm the detection.
This story really hits home with me. One of my brothers died of lymphoma last year. It had been misdiagnosed for a long time and by the time it was diagnosed, it had spread throughout his body. He died less than 9 months later. A discovery like this one, adapted to detect lymphoma, might’ve saved his life.
Well, I can think of few things better to master in science and engineering than the, you know, scientific method. Yes, deductive reasoning in action is laborious and often tedious, but it is how one moves forward.
And this should hit home for most of us. If you’ve made it past the age of 30, you’re basically leaving this Earth one of three ways: cancer, heart disease or extreme oldness.
His approach is so simple and inexpensive that it might be part of a standard physical within a few years.
It sounds more like his approach will be as simple and inexpensive as home diabetes testing. In which case you can test yourself for cancer without even a co-pay or having to schedule a doctors visit.
Well, I can think of few things better to master in science and engineering than the, you know, scientific method.
Not so much. To quote Brother Dr. Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican astronomer:
This is the way science actually works:
You learned the scientific method when you were kids. “The scientist observes a problem, comes up with a hypothesis, devises an experiment to test the hypothesis…”
You learned all this? Bullshit! Nobody actually works that way.
You got a new hammer, you look for things you can smash with your new hammer, to see what breaks, and afterwards, then you sort of work backwards to, “Oh, I guess that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?”
You wouldn’t learn that in college, though. You can get a four-year science degree without ever working on a real research problem — and most people don’t even major in science.