On Becoming a Math Whiz: My Advice to a New MIT Student. April 28th, 2011 · 43 comments Here’s how to become a math whiz: Keep working on your problem set after you get stuck. Don’t just sit and stare at it: think hard; until you’re exhausted; then come back the next day and try again. This will be uncomfortable, but that discomfort is the feeling of your brain stretching to accommodate new abilities. This advice came to mind recently when I received an e-mail from a high school senior. “Yesterday, I was accepted to MIT,” he began. I explained that I had been studying theoretical computer science and mathematics at a high-level for the past decade, much of it spent right here at MIT. Junior graduate students think senior graduate students are smarter, but they’re not: they simply have more practice.
Senior graduate students think junior professors are smarter, but they’re not: they simply have more practice. And so on. When I arrived at Dartmouth, to name another example, I didn’t consider myself good at math. That’s where you make up ground. Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. At Yale, Some Say Misogyny Goes Unheeded. Douglas Healey for The New York Times Hannah Zeavin, a Yale junior from Brooklyn, said, “If you’re not expelling people who are committing rape, as was the case with my friends’ assailants, that means those men are still around.” In 2008, fraternity members photographed themselves in front of the Yale Women’s Center with a poster reading, “We Love Yale Sluts.” In 2009, a widely e-mailed “preseason scouting report” rated the desirability of about 50 newly arrived freshman women by the number of drinks a man would need in order to have sex with them.
And in October, fraternity pledges paraded through a residential quadrangle chanting: “No means yes!” Catherine Sheard, a junior from Canton, N.Y., heard the chants while studying, and reacted the way many students have. “I thought it was really obnoxious and closed the window,” she said. Suddenly, however, these episodes have the campus in a state of high alert. The 26-page complaint, filed on March 15, has not been made public. Dr. Harvardexam. Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you. I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious. Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel, it’s simply how he views the world. Consider the 2000 Nasdaq crash. And after the crash, Thiel insisted there hadn’t really been a crash: He argued the equity bubble had simply shifted onto the housing market.
So Friday, as I sat with Thiel in his San Francisco home that he finally owns, I was curious what he thinks of the current Web frenzy. Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Making matters worse was a 2005 President George W.