[1670] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: wasted years
lavin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lavin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Nov 15 13:54:32 1990
The years of munging through class material that you later more or
less forget are not wasted; in spite of what people say, I really
believe that what MIT teaches you (possibly unintentionally) is *how* to
learn. The pace and pressure of the way you have to learn stuff here
are such that few folks can recite everything from all the classes
they took. (Ok, there are some exceptions, people who had 5.0 grade
averages and rememeber absolutely everything, but I haven't known too
many of those.)
For most things you learn, if you stop using them, they go away. When
was the last time you needed to calculate the speed a frictionless
cylinder would have at the bottom of its frictionless ramp? But if
you need to figure that stuff out, the "template" for it is still
mostly there, in your head, and most importantly, you know *where to
look it up.*
It's how the real world works. Talk to engineers out there, and you'd
be amazed at how little, in some sense, they remember. But the good
ones know how to learn anything they need to for whatever job they're
trying to do.
