I asked several friends who were professors and/or eminent hackers what they thought of Undergraduation. Their comments were so good that I thought I'd just give them directly to you. I've given them all codenames for now, since some may want to remain anonymous. NT: The one thing that I felt was missing from your essay was a statement supporting or dispelling the notion that CS is for loners. I disagree with this notion. I love hacking, but I love it even more when it's a shared experience. The hard problems seem just a bit more surmountable when there's two of you. Of course, Fred Brooks's law about adding manpower comes into play eventually. The rule: work in small groups with good people. Stay away from large bureaucratic organizations where status reports are more important than thinking outside the box. There are many individual aspects to CS, just like art. But, being an individual doesn't mean that the machine takes the place of good friends, colleagues, and mentors. TO: I think you should say "College is where faking starts to stop working." FS: Math is more difficult than CS, no question. However, it is not at all clear to me that math has as much intellectual content as CS. The math hills are individually harder to climb, but CS is a bigger piece of landscape. (Formally, CS has to encompass reasoning about stateful objects with histories. There are important ways in which this is more difficult and general than pure axiomatic systems.) Empirically, I don't think the difference between math and CS is very useful for predicting how interesting and effective a thinker will come out the other end. So, while I agree with the spirit of your "dropout graph" heuristic, I think math and CS are an unhelpful choice to explain it with. Much better to note that both are hard subjects with real content, and contrast them with some sort of blatant basket-weaving like political science or (urgh) "ethnic studies." "They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain." Indeed; I think pure mathematics makes excellent weightlifting. SA: The problem with graphics as an application is that doing a decent 3D game has a large component of movie making in it. You need motion capture and an art department for all the textures and backgrounds. Nobody will be impressed with pink cubes and green spheres bouncing around on the screen. I think the technology has pretty much surpassed anyone's ability to do anything simple and cool with it. DF: I found, when I was studying mathematics, that 2 things were true: (1) the teacher was not too good and (2) the book was not too good. So I would always buy a half-dozen books on the topic and try to get the full picture by reading the same sections in each book. The combination helped me understand much more than the sum of the content. Also, I was never opposed to reading something as much as 10 times until I squeezed everything out of it. I have found mathematics and especially formal logic to be an indispensible tool for structuring ideas. It was like Latin for me. Latin was this very clean natural language and logic was this very clean formal language. I had to teach it to myself because the logic course I had was the first 30 pages of Mendelsohn. When you want to say something unequivocally, describing formally is a good first start. When you want to understand, for example, the excitement of monads, understanding logic and some category theory helps. Category theory is also quite pretty. It simply says that everything has to be described in terms of function composition and this operator has to satisfy certain properties. If you think of logic as something alive, which allows you to prove theorems, it is fascinating. Just think about it: prove theorems by computer. It is mind-boggling. It will not likely lead to a start-up being successful, but what a moment when you prove a theorem without heuristics, etc. I have insisted that all my graduate students minor in logic, so that should say something. ML: The real reason to study math is not that it's useful but that it's cool. This should be all the reason a would-be hacker needs. Also, with its emphasis on rigor and abstraction, it's cool in a lot of the same ways as programming at its best. The fact that it's occasionally useful as well is just lagniappe. I also disagree that good mathematicians tend to be bad teachers. Having enjoyed the privilege of an expensive education, I am of the opinion that the very best mathematicians are usually (certainly not always) rather good teachers and are sometimes extraordinarily good. The real reason it is hard to learn what math is about is that mathematical understanding requires new and difficult (at least at first) ways of thinking. Cookbook calculus courses sidestep these difficulties and therefore teach little of value. Really understanding calculus was hard for Newton and is hard today.