The worthwhile departments, in my opinion, are math, the hard sciences, engineering, history (especially economic and social history, and the history of science), architecture, and the classics. A survey course in art history may be worthwhile. Modern literature is important, but the way to learn about it is just to read. I don't know enough about music to say.

You can skip the social sciences, philosophy, and the various departments created recently in response to political pressures. Many of these fields talk about important problems, certainly. But the way they talk about them is useless. For example, philosophy talks, among other things, about our obligations to one another; but you can learn more about this from a wise grandmother or E. B. White than from an academic philosopher.

I speak here from experience. I should probably have been offended when people laughed at Clinton for saying "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." I took about five classes in college on what the meaning of "is" is.

Another way to figure out which fields are worth studying is to create the dropout graph. For example, I know many people who switched from math to computer science because they found math too hard, and no one who did the opposite. People don't do hard things gratuitously; no one will work on a harder problem unless it is proportionately (or at least log(n)) more rewarding. So probably math is more worth studying than computer science. By similar comparisons you can make a graph of all the departments in a university. At the bottom you'll find the subjects with least intellectual content.

If you use this method, you'll get roughly the same answer I just gave.

Language courses are an anomaly. I think they're better considered as extracurricular activities, like pottery classes. They'd be far more useful when combined with some time living in a country where the language is spoken. On a whim I studied Arabic as a freshman. It was a lot of work, and the only lasting benefits were a weird ability to identify semitic roots and some insights into how people recognize words.

Studio art and creative writing courses are wildcards. Usually you don't get taught much: you just work (or don't work) on whatever you want, and then sit around offering "crits" of one another's creations under the vague supervision of the teacher. But writing and art are both very hard problems that (some) people work honestly at, so they're worth doing, especially if you can find a good teacher.

Of course college students have to think about more than just learning. There are also two practical problems to consider: jobs, and graduate school.

In theory a liberal education is not supposed to supply job training. But everyone knows this is a bit of a fib. Hackers at every college learn practical skills, and not by accident.

What you should learn to get a job depends on the kind you want. If you want to work in a big company, learn how to hack Blub on Windows. If you want to work at a cool little company or research lab, you'll do better to learn Ruby on Linux. And if you want to start your own company, which I think will be more and more common, master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse.

There is not a direct correlation between the skills you should learn in college and those you'll use in a job. You should aim slightly high in college.

In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world. They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.

The programs you write in classes differ in three critical ways from the ones you'll write in the real world: they're small; you get to start from scratch; and the problem is usually artificial and predetermined. In the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, and often require you to figure out what the problem is before you can solve it.

You don't have to wait to leave (or even enter) college to learn these skills. If you want to learn how to deal with existing code, for example, you can contribute to open-source projects. The sort of employer you want to work for will be as impressed by that as good grades on class assignments.

In existing open-source projects you don't get much practice at the third skill, deciding what problems to solve. But there's nothing to stop you starting new projects of your own. And good employers will be even more impressed with that.

What sort of problem should you try to solve? One way to answer that is to ask what you need as a user. For example, I stumbled on a good algorithm for spam filtering because I wanted to stop getting spam. Now what I wish I had was a mail reader that somehow prevented my inbox from filling up. I tend to use my inbox as a todo list. But that's like using a screwdriver to open bottles; what one really wants is a bottle opener.

What about grad school? Should you go? And how do you get into a good one?

In principle, grad school is professional training in research, and you shouldn't go unless you want to do research as a career. And yet half the people who get PhDs in CS don't go into research. I didn't go to grad school to become a professor. I went because I wanted to learn more.

So if you're mainly interested in hacking and you go to grad school, you'll find a lot of other people who are similarly out of their element. And if half the people around you are out of their element in the same way you are, are you really out of your element?

There's a fundamental problem in "computer science," and it surfaces in situations like this. No one is sure what "research" is supposed to be. A lot of research is hacking that had to be crammed into the form of an academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication.

So it's kind of misleading to ask whether you'll be at home in grad school, because very few people are quite at home in computer science. The whole field is uncomfortable in its own skin. So the fact that you're mainly interested in hacking shouldn't deter you from going to grad school. Just be warned you'll have to do a lot of stuff you don't like.

Number one will be your dissertation. Almost everyone hates their dissertation by the time they're done with it. The process inherently tends to produce an unpleasant result, like a cake made out of whole wheat flour and baked for twelve hours. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors.

But thousands before you have suffered through writing a dissertation. And aside from that, grad school is close to paradise. Many people remember it as the happiest time of their lives. And nearly all the rest, including me, remember it as a period that would have been, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation. [5]

The danger with grad school is that you don't see the scary part upfront. PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several years of classes. So by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation, you're already several years in. If you quit now, you'll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won't like that idea. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure.

On the whole, grad school is probably better than most alternatives. You meet a lot of smart people, and your glum procrastination will at least be a powerful common bond. And of course you have a PhD at the end. I forgot about that. I suppose that's worth something.