Hey besties!!

Welp guess my goal of writing weekly essays was short lived. This week's short essay drop is on college and admissions, inspired by the biweekly Reboot fellowship hang, watching Operation Varsity Blues, and this short essay from Inqiure on how removing standardized testing from college apps increases inequality (it's a great short read).

On College

Watching the mockumentary made me relive all of the emotions that went through the college admissions process. All of the stress of applications, the constant strain of realizing that everything in your life sort of led up to this point (spoiler: it didn't), and the devastating feeling of rejection. If you haven't checked it out on Netflix, I highly recommend it. It goes by in a whirlwind and hits you in the face with how messed up the application process is, (and also higher education), and the society that we currently live in. Higher education is singularly approaching a world where acceptance rates are dropping, people are still leveraging backdoor techniques to get in (if you have millions, you're set), and yet the value is increasingly questionable as it sends people thousands of dollars into debt.

College has turned from a place where people freely explore their interests to one that serves are more of a vocational training program. Even as schools such as Brown implement the open curriculum so that students have the freedom of choice, social and parental pressures (ever heard the phrase that college is the best four years of your life? It's not btw) force you to randomly optimize with zero knowledge of what the real world is like. As such, many students end up floundering around the first couple of years before figuring out what they want to do in senior year (or have a dedicated 15 year plan if you're premed).

If you've been on Twitter at all, there's a ton of discourse on unbundling higher education . If you're familiar with the software landscape (or history broadly), you'll recognize that this is somewhat bullshit. Things come in cycles. We bundle. Then unbundle. Find a notetaking app that does it all. Then fall in love with one that does something really well. Over and over again until we die. As such, a more interesting question is how can we best adjust the college and learning experience to best fit with how we are as humans.

Stanford d.school digs into this idea in their project. One interesting concept is the idea of an Open Loop university, that you get four years of college whenever you want them, when you need them. From an algorithms perspective, it's interesting. We're treating life as a greedy algorithm where we want to maximize our learnings/goals/growth whenever we have the chance. Thus, if we're 30, and want to go back to school for a year, we can. It increases optionality, increases flexibility, and allows us to take classes that are fulfilling and in line with where we are in life, rather than taking an easy humanities class just to get a GPA booster.

One of the other aspects that people really enjoy about college is the opportunity to meet people their age who go through some of the same struggles. However, Open Loop provides this opportunity and more. Not only are you able to meet people further in their career, you interact with a wider range of human beings, and are also able to chat in a more informal way. No more awkward LinkedIn DM's or cold emails asking if you could "pick their brain" about their job for 15 minutes in a thinly veiled attempt to be recruited.

This idea is super interesting as the world moves towards a more decentralized society. With the rise of the remote work, optionality has higher value for people who have felt locked into their job. These ideas should translate and start from where people think about their careers: college.

Thanks so much for hearing some of my musings and if you ever have thoughts, would love to chat about them.

Other things I'm up to:

• Started working at Blend as an intern on the Consumer Banking Team!
• In LA for a couple weeks then heading off to SF
• Eating too much ice cream