Ask HN: No diversity at university: how to make life more interesting?

CS is a dry subject that attracts autists for better or worse. Try something extracurricular and/or pick up a hobby. I wouldn't transfer unless you don't like the subject matter. Do know that university will teach you the most boring aspects of computer science, it is much more interesting in the real world.

Difficulties are there to suggest that we must fight to shape our own life the way we want, which is a valuable lesson itself. If uni is not working for you right now because the context is boring, find a sustainable way to transfer to a different, more lively uni without sacrificing your elected STEM degree? On the contrary, a gap year would be a radical turn, and nobody can honestly tell how and where you will be at the end of 2022. Good luck!

Welcome to life. A lot of it sucks, grind it out. I can tell you it doesn’t end here. You may find post-college more rewarding, or equally soul sucking. It takes years, best of luck, not everyone lucks in to an amazing life.

Average state school can have a wide range of differences… I know for example PSU has a wide range of diversity if you look.

From your two options, it sounds like continuing on at your current university doesn’t sound like an option.

For 1- why do you have to transfer? If you’re interested in a degree in STEM finish the degree. You can usually take courses outside of your major.

If you are at a large university, you may just not be finding the right crowd for you. Does your university have anything like “global programs” or “international scholars”? See if anyone has any programs (extracurricular, may be geared towards visiting scholars and graduate ) called things like “conversation partners” (just an idea and might not be the right fit for you).

Instead of taking a gap year, you could also find a university where you could do a semester (s) abroad. This is usually possible in some way shape or form.

Personal experience- in university I had a very diverse friend set. However, over a decade later, I only have one friend I went to university with who I am close with. (We talk nearly daily!).

However I always worked a job, and I was lucky with the role I had at the time. I still have 3-4 friends from that role who have turned out to be friendships that have lasted 10+ years.

Also, I have found this post by Sam Altman helpful at times.

https://blog.samaltman.com/the-days-are-long-but-the-decades...

Finish what You started, the worst thing You could do is transfer out. From your statement about doing 1st year CS in high school I am assuming You are younger than the majority of students ~19 years old, this comes with its own set of issues and will not be different at any other school.

My advise, work your but off and get that degree, then revisit attending a different school to study in one of the other subjects You mentioned. Having an education in a second area will make You stand out in any industry. I suspect You will have a much more enjoyable time at a liberal arts college once You are a bit older and have the confidence of successfully completing your current schooling.

Some people have a difficult time adjusting from being rock stars in high school to average students in post secondary where it seems everyone is caught up in there own issues and professors are indifferent to new students needs. Don't be discouraged by the lack of social connections in your first year, it will get better as time goes by and the herd is thinned from other students choosing your 1st two ideas. Don't fall for the trap and push through, You can do it and will be better off in the long run.

I did option #1 - the liberal arts college. It does give you what you ask for, but it is not handed to you on a platter. Because no matter how diverse and interesting the environment, you get out of it what you put into it. The gap year is not a bad idea, but it will change you, not the college experience. Still, that may be what you need - right now, it sounds like you are expecting the environment to actively hand you value. College doesn't do that - college is a place where you can pull value from it when you actively seek to. It is an active process - you need to go in with focus and seek out the value it can offer.

That is the biggest change between high school and college - high school builds an environment where everyone is pushed together towards the same end goal. But college makes you become the active ingredient on your own, choosing your own path, finding your own activities, conversations, and friends, and grasping your own value from the experience.

If you are ready to do that, try another semester with that perspective and see how it goes. If you are not ready to do that, take a gap year and re-evaluate later.

A state school likely has a variety of majors, including liberal arts degrees; not just STEM. You should be bumping into those students in your general education requirements (philosophy, writing/speech, arts, etc). You might find more diversity in those classes, that the entire student body has to take, although maybe not. When you have to take a non-program elective, make sure you pick interesting classes.

If you're looking for people from other countries, your state school probably has an international program (international students generally pay the school's sticker price, which helps balance the books), see if there's some way to get involved with that. There likely won't be as much diversity as at a school with a world renowned program, especially since obtaining visas and crossing borders have been challenging recently, but there should be some.

If you end up taking a gap semester, I highly recommend spending time in Dar es Salaam. It's a great city, tons of people everywhere, lots to see and do. The population explosion[0] and median age of ~19 (compared to ~39 in the US) gives it a vibrancy and dynamism that is hard to find in the West.

There would be challenging moments during your stay of course, but if you play your cards right and talk with the right people, you'll get a sense of what's in play there and how you might be able to contribute should you choose to return to the region.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/dar-es-salaam...

In modern Western societies, university is a default conformist path to a cushy life. So, don't be surprised to meet mostly ordinary/boring people there. The most curious, independent and interesting young people generally don't go to universities, but instead blaze their own path.

Since you're at the university though, perhaps people majoring in fields with little to no market value could be a more interesting bunch. They didn't optimize for money and safety, but instead for what interests them - that's a good sign (although of course there'll also be plenty of people who only chose a liberal arts major because the workload is lighter and/or they couldn't intellectually make it in STEM).

> instead I have found empty people with little ambition and little interest in the world outside of a regional microcosm.

You are 100% at the wrong school. Transfer ASAP. As you note the people are a big part of the reason for actually going to a school.

I think you'd find the people and education you're looking for at a U1 type University (my bias opinion). Get into the best one you can - if nothing else the average ambition of the students will be higher.

This is exactly the kind of stuff we try to address with out hobbytwin app. We are relatively new and are looking to make college life for students more engaging, diverse and interesting irrespective of your field of study. I suggest that instead of running away from it, build the community that you want, find other like minded students into the things you want though out app. You can send us an email at support@hobbytwin.org and we can guide you through it.

Do you have international students on your campus? Perhaps hangout with them.

I went to average college in redneck-ish city in middle of nowhere. I had a lot of local and international (Asians, Europeans, South Americans) friends. I found a lot of local students were very deep thinkers and we had very deep conversations like what you maybe seeking. My guess is that these deep thinking locals seeked us international students out.

I recommend trying to befriend some of the graduate students at your field. Maybe try to get involved with research with your professors. In my experience those who go for a PhD tend to be from a wider variety of backgrounds, and more intellectually curious.

I’m sure you can find these sorts of people in the regular student body as well, but they may be harder to find!

The first option looks good. Would you be interested to check if you can transfer to a more exciting but less pragmatic STEM degree - pure mathematics, physics, astronomy? Maybe, you can find more interesting people there?

Also, remember to be pro-active and be an interesting person yourself :)

Is the Covid reaction in your locale a factor? Depending on where you are, the local Covid rules and restrictions may have destroyed much of the atmosphere and attempts to build a social life.

Enroll / Transfer to a university abroad, possibly in non English speaking country. Guaranteed challenge & rewards.

Gap year, 100% the best thing I had done at university.

People in sports are more driven

I'm a lot older, but I attended an International Boarding School as well for middle and high school. I also had a similar sense of disillusion when I came to the US. I have a BS in STEM (and I took a lot of liberal arts classes) and a PhD in a non STEM field. Throwaway account because I value my privacy.

First of all, look up the term "Third Culture Kids." There's a book about this topic by David C. Pollock and Ruth E. Van Reken. I read that book years after becoming a proper adult and there was a lot in there that gave me some perspective on how I felt like I didn’t fit in. I think it would have been useful when I was an undergrad.

I’m going to now speak from the heart based on my experience. Please don’t take any of the wrong way, and some of it may not apply to you. This is a very personal topic, so some of it may be very strong.

International Boarding Schools are an artificial environment where kids live very privileged lives. The majority (not all) of the students come from privileged backgrounds. Many of those students are there because their parents want to give their kids a stability they cannot offer at home due to jobs (e.g. parent works in a job where they have to move countries every 2 years), country stability, (e.g. parent(s) who earn well, but live in country that is politically/economically unstable and/or has a bad education system), or the parents migrated away from their home country and they want their kids experience their home country. There are plenty of other reasons, such as abusive or neglectful parents who just need to keep their kids busy somewhere till they are old enough to move out. Not everyone is economically privileged - sometimes the schools will give discounted rates to missionary children from affiliated religious groups.

This creates a highly artificial environment with a particular kind of diversity. At least in my school, there was plenty of diversity of where people were from, but limited diversity of economic backgrounds or financial status. Barely any students were poor or lower-middle class. Nobody had parents who were blue-collar or did manual labor jobs. We could all celebrate Easter, Eid, and Diwali because we were far from places where being a certain shade of skin color or religion disadvantaged you for life.

In these schools privileged, culturally diverse, kids can be ambitious because they have a strong safety net, where you can have diverse conversations about poverty and colonialism in Africa while ignoring all the school workers (e.g. kitchen staff, maids, custodial staff) who live in poverty while making sure you have food to eat and clean your toilets. And you can take classes like “Theory of Knowledge,” which teaches you some things, but also makes students arrogant about how smart they are.

If you are looking for a place like that, the only other place like that is another international boarding school.

The first thing to realize is that part of what you are missing is having a common background with your classmates. They are talking about things that are relevant to them based on their shared experience growing up in the US (I assume you’re in the US?). You have a different experience growing up.

The topics they want to discuss may seem like a “regional microcosm” to you, but the topics people talk about are based on how they grew up. Even the TV shows they watched as kids might be totally different from what you did.

When I was an undergrad, I knew some American kids would get frustrated with International Students because they felt like what we spoke about was rooted in our past experiences. Did they also feel like International students only spoke about things that were our “regional microcosm” and we weren’t open to the American experience? Did they feel we weren’t being diverse?

I’ve been in the US for 20+ years, and not having this shared background has been a hindrance to making friendships, even today.

Beyond this, you probably also now interact with people with a diversity of economic backgrounds and social status. My first year of undergrad, there were people on my dorm floor with parents ranging from PhDs to high-school dropouts. It was really difficult connecting with some people. By my 2nd year, over 50% on my floor had dropped out, and the majority of those had parents in blue-collar jobs. By my 3rd year, even more people had dropped out. It was a lot easier to talk to people since a bigger percentage of the remaining students had safety nets and the mental space to sit around and talk about a wider range of topics, and not how their parents were pressuring them to join the family mechanic business instead of studying mechanical engineering.

I know more than a few international undergrad students who were able to sail through the first year, get crushed towards the end of the second year as things got harder and they became lazy, and then have to relearn to learn in their 3rd year.

Personally, I wouldn’t make the assumption that you’ll find the community of like-minded people in liberal arts. As already said, a lot of them won’t have the experience you had in boarding school. Also most people who go to college do so because they have to. Education and Liberal arts (psychology seems like a big one) is a common place where people land when they don’t know what to do. I say this having been a student and an instructor (during my PhD years) of social science classes. Most of the students are disengaged. Some are only temporarily passionate about whatever new topic allows them to quietly boast about their “critical thinking skills” (e.g. learning about cultural relativism in anthropology). You’d be lucky to find 3 students in a class of 20 who have a sustaining passion about anything they are learning.

Finally, a comment on the long term view about leaving a STEM major for a liberal arts school. At least in my boarding school, most of the people were competitive from a career standpoint. Everybody wanted to become a lawyer, doctor, business owner, executive, etc. This created a lot of internal pressure for people to have jobs of a certain status. And about 5-6 years after high school was over, a lot of the “lifetime” friendships broke as the job status gaps appeared. And some people (including me) went through rough personal periods in because we couldn’t achieve what we saw our boarding school classmates were achieving.

International Boarding school or not, it crushes your soul when you finish your degree and you can't get a decent paying job for years. Unless you are the type of person who has zero issue enjoying the money your parent’s earned, that will slowly eat up your insides. A STEM degree is some degree of insurance against that.

Before you make any decisions, I'd encourage you to reflect on what you feel you are are missing and if you've correctly understood where you can find the fix. I attended two schools and I found the bigger state university attracted a more diverse set of people and did a better job retaining students, which gave me a more diverse environment.

All of the above is a reflection of my experience and might not represent you. I apologize if I’ve offended you or said something you feel is just an assumption on my part and mischaracterizes your experience.

Gap year sounds like a great idea.

Regarding worthwhile courses that aren't just a repeat of what you might learn in grad school or working for a company, I recommend taking challenging courses outside your discipline. You may also find some thoughtful and interesting people in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, or other engineering departments. Also go to graduate seminars and attend talks. At any university there is usually a continuous schedule of interesting speakers of all kinds as well as cultural events. Take advantage of them.

Regarding CS, I recommend skipping anything you already know and enrolling in upper division and graduate courses. You may also find that adding some EE courses (circuits, computer architecture, signal processing) or ME courses (robotics) into your CS/STEM mix might add some interest and challenge.

Faculty jobs are insanely competitive; this means that at any school anywhere you are going to find basically superstar faculty (at least in terms of their CV.) Go find them and join their labs and research projects. If there is an undergraduate research program, apply for it. Otherwise knock on doors, talk to faculty, put together an independent study course, apply for research lab jobs, talk to grad students, write an undergraduate thesis, etc..

Regarding extracurriculars, you might consider founding your own club with like-minded people, like an entrepreneurship club. Sometimes student chapters of technical societies like the ACM can be interesting and fun. You might also enjoy a musical ensemble, theater production, sports team, outdoors/wilderness expedition club, debate club, a robot or programming competition club, or a hackerspace. Also "public service" type organizations in the university (or beyond) whose purpose is to benefiting the local (or even global) community can be motivating and worthwhile.

It sounds like you want more high-motivation, ambitious people. You might find them in other majors or perhaps at another school (maybe consider transferring) or in a startup company. Or maybe somewhere you never thought to look - maybe ROTC, or pre-medical societies, or student government, or in the law/medical/business/graduate engineering schools.

At many business schools there are also students looking for a "founding partner" to do all of the technical work in a startup company while they take most of the money for doing the "business" part. Perhaps that person could be you (for better or for worse.)

I recommend thinking of the university as a set of components (professors, advisors, lab facilities, libraries, undergraduate and graduate students, high-speed symmetric internet connections, interesting lectures and events, gyms and athletic facilities, etc..) but it is up to you to assemble them into an education that you find inspiring and worthwhile.

Lastly: talking to faculty is underrated. You may get brushed off by some, but many faculty appreciate cheap labor as well as highly motivated students, so keep asking.

And post-lastly: if you can be the #1 student at your university (and ideally build a research portfolio) you may be in good shape for graduate school if you are interested. It's harder to be #1 at a school packed full of overachievers. On the other hand, some companies recruit primarily from a small set of elite schools, so attending one of them can be an easier pipeline into those companies.

i suspect once anyone goes to a Deweyite-style school, they're doomed to misery if/when they get stuck going to a non-Deweyite school. I think of it as Montessori-style schooling -- except for all age groups -- not sure if that is accurate or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey#On_education_and_te...

i'm sure that your case is relatively common, but i don't suspect the solution is well-known.

what is the solution?

i don't know.

but i know i've read 'it' several/dozen times in the past. here i'm thinking of just conintuing to search for 'your path', working hard, following your interests, being bold, taking action, finding others to collaborate/work with, etc.

cases of many of the big names in tech and elsewhere can be instructive in that, even if you don't share their values, you might be able to find some confidence in the way they went their own way.

maybe it was steve jobs auditing classes and always asking, 'why not do sometihng _this_ way?'. maybe it was mlk saying, 'yeah, racism is really bad, but maybe we can get to an even-more critical/root problem by trying to tackle poverty?'.

the author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, said he "designed his own major" in college. sounds reasonable.

i'm a big Chomsky fanboi, and one thing he has said to students when asked what they should do to live meaningful lives was something like, "find things that interest you, maybe a problem or some problems, and work on understanding and then solving them". sounds simple enough, but maybe also correct?

this video clip does not have that bit i just mentioned, but has other thoughts on education generally:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1309&v=DdNAUJWJN...

i think you can seek out people in a few ways:

0) change your major to non-STEM. that shit just boring. or, do the James Clear thing.

1) advertise -- literally start a club or similar; friday night paris salon for those interested in being interested

2) go meet some theatre/drama/english/entrepreneur majors. take some courses. switch to those majors. esp English. and theatre/drama.

3) take some philosophy courses

also, if you start working on a problem, any problem, you might end up attracting people who are interested in working on the same problem -- or just people, like you, who are like, 'is anything _happening_ here?'

i do think it's true to a certain extent that you can create your own reality, even in a 'boring' situation. i think of many hollywood-types that had umpteen 'failed' projects before they made anything that people would actually pay for.

good luck!