I wrote this post in March of my freshman year at Penn. I might emphasize different things now and have a little more tact but I think it's worth reposting. Some of the advice here is Penn-specific; having a car definitely helped solve some of these problems. I must admit I wasn't that great at following my own advice. If your friends are all wearing City Sports t-shirts, buy a City Sports t-shirt. You are, as a freshman and right out of high school, most likely a stranger in a strange land, and it won't hurt to blend in as much as possible. If you are planning on joining a fraternity, start investing in Ralph Lauren. Get a fake ID. Get a good quality one that scans and blacklights, which will set you back around $120. You will need it to get into the clubs and bars around Philadelphia. Keep your room clean. If you can, stack your beds. It's hard to socialize in a small room. Buy alcohol. You will be popular with your friends if you can supply alcohol to them. You will always be able to do schoolwork. Go out. Be generous with your money. If you have money (and if you go to Penn, I am guessing you do). Smile. Nobody likes a grouch. Enter your room with a purpose: Use your room to change clothes, to pick up or drop off schoolbooks, to sleep, to drink with your friends, and to hook up with sloppy drunk chicks. You will not be social in your room. Get off your damn computer. If I had a nickel for every hour I spent checking Facebook, or walking by people's dorms seeing them staring at their computers, I would be rich enough to donate a building. Don't eat alone. Going down to the dining hall and trying to find people doesn't count. Meals are a great time to catch up with people that you don't see every day. Make your habits social habits. If you really like playing basketball, find friends to play basketball with. Reading and playing online poker are nice habits but you will not make friends doing them. Then again, I write a blog and have Google Reader as my homepage.

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The fundamental problem is that hanging out with other people begets more hanging out with other people (arranging to play frisbee/drink/study in an hour, etc), and the converse is also true: being alone begets more being alone. As an introvert, you will want to have time to yourself: if you're in a double this means lots of hanging out in the library, if you're in a single, in your room. When I was at Penn I got really angry one time and decided to disappear for a few days and see how long it would be before anyone noticed. I didn't prove anything and I didn't really have a plan for what I'd do if someone actually did text/call me. This is a pretty flawed view of the world. When you are in college you use an availability heuristic to figure out who to hang out with - you see who's around and plan to hang out with those people. If people don't call you to hang out they aren't evil, they probably just assumed you had other plans. If you don't have other plans, you have to find ways around this without sending bad signals. One of the keys is to make plans at meals. Groups are great because then you can make plans together and no one has to act like they are really looking hard for people to hang out with. The key ones to target are lunches and dinners Thursday through Saturday. Try not to ever eat by yourself, it's a bad signal. If you have to eat alone put lots of work in front of you, if people come up to you complain about how your teacher is totally railing you with work, it's entirely unfair, and you can't wait to get out and party in X number of days, oh and by the way what are your plans? Or, go eat alone at the nicest restaurant in town, order wine, tip generously and act like it's totally normal. Working in the computer lab is helpful too. Don't expect to get work done there but you can talk to people, complain about all the work you have to do and sometimes even have intellectual conversations. Set up weekly social events like hookah in the quad or cooking on Fridays or philosophy at the Press. This way you don't have to arrange anything, you'll be comfortable with the people you're hanging out with, and you can be doing whatever the whole day before you're supposed to meet. My favorite parts of the week are rock climbing on Mondays and bowling on Wednesdays. Take chances to give in-class presentations or speak in public when they are offered. With practice these are easy opportunities to excel. Take every opportunity to meet people through classes.

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• This XKCD comic about productivity is very funny and visualizes something I can see happening to a lot of people that talk about productivity. I have stopped trying to show off by blogging about productive techniques I use. I probably haven't stuck with any of them.
• For me the most effective to do list is my brain, followed by the Notes app on my iPod, the most effective list size is "three" and the most effective time range is "right after class ends." Everything else works until I blog about it (about a week) and then I stop using it. I use Google Calendar for events and birthdays and news. I forget about 100% of events that I don't put in there.
• I've stopped writing for the Forum. Most of the stuff I had to say fell into the category of "intelligently defend an unpopular position, and/or show off my way of looking at the world." The goal is probably to show other CMCers how wrong they are, and I've realized I don't really want to do that.
• I was one of four students invited to talk at Idea Night at the Ath. I spent most of the day thinking about the topic and what I should say, and got really nervous about it. But I totally misread which part of the talk would be hard. I was worried about saying intelligent things for 12 minutes, but I should have worried more about entertaining the audience. I went in thinking "I am speaking at the Athenaeum, so like most Ath speakers I'll mimic an academic person." I gave a really academic sounding talk about financial models. But what I should have thought was "I am speaking to other students so I should be funny." Instead I gave a really boring talk and finished in last place. I also violated my Forum no-writing rule and picked a unpopular position - bashing the finance industry when there are a ton of students from CMC that go into finance. The winner totally understood the audience and gave a talk about how the US should invade Canada. The lesson is to place less importance on the venue and more importance on the audience.
• Last month my dad wanted me to take a chance on something and he vigorously encouraged me to do it. The value of the thing was obvious to me even without the encouragement, but I never got around to doing it. I think it has to do with who owns the credit if it turns out well. When you want to motivate someone to do something, if you can let them own the idea, they're probably more likely to do it. Otherwise what's their incentive? If they do it and it turns out well you take all the credit. On the other hand they might not put two and two together, so you might have to wait a long time. So if I'm coaching this summer I'll try to experiment with different approaches to encouraging people to do things they haven't tried before, like dribble with their left hand.
• In startups everyone says you want to build the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - the smallest possible complete product - to start getting feedback from users, and to avoid building a perfect product which no one wants. When people say this I've nodded my head vigorously, but now I have a product that I've been making ridiculous excuses to not launch - "it'll cost me money, I need feature X and feature Y, etc." When Good Morning CMC started it looked like this: So I need to just launch it.
• I need some sort of MVP rule for emails. Sometimes I get caught up in "I need to send this person the perfect email," and I never send it. I need some sort of rule like "whatever's in your drafts folder at 5pm will automatically be sent to the recipient" to force me to actually send the damn email. This is in line with my semester goal of taking more low-cost, high-value opportunities. A lot of times the biggest obstacle to pursuing those is myself.
• I've started charging money for ads on top of Good Morning CMC. The minute after I got my first $5 payment in Google Checkout I said "duh, why haven't I done this since day 1?" So that's something to keep in mind for the future - I'm likely to regret not charging for something, and in addition I'll make more money and possibly earn more respect with a paid product than a free one.

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• I used Java to implement algorithms like Floyd Warshall, max-heap, Ford-Fulkerson and others, for the ICPC competition. This involves writing mostly for-loops, arrays, some lists and maybe 1 level of inheritance. I don't *know* Java, in the sense that I've never used any of the stuff that *makes* it Java.
• For that matter, there's a lot of stuff I don't know. As I've been reading in my favorite new book, Coders at Work, you could research the details behind something like how the text you're reading appears on the screen to an almost infinite level of detail. For example, this text is in an HTML document which is formatted with CSS. But the HTML doc doesn't exist anywhere - it's dynamically generated by WordPress and PHP. Your browser contains instructions on how to display HTML/CSS and it's written in C, or C++. But it has to run on the operating system, which is UNIX, Linux or Windows, and each of those has its own windowing system and programming hooks. Finally the operating system has to divide time between all the applications currently running, figure out which one of them is "foremost" and display it on the screen, which is a piece of hardware requiring a special set of instructions from the operating system. And even that's missing a whole lot of obvious places to dive in for at least a few months on things like font rendering, multithreading, sending bits over a wire with HTTP, serving requests with Apache, and more.
• One thing people say about technically skilled college graduates is that they can learn a ton and double their value in the first few years out of college, because you are programming all day and learning from the best in the industry. The other thing people say about startups is that when you work at a startup you might have to do everything and learn crazy new things from scratch all the time. I learn quickly but it's hard to show that to a company, or at least to disting. So you have to try to learn at your slow pace, or try to start a company yourself to learn at a fast pace, and then get into a startup.
• I talked about this with Nick Bergson-Shilock from Hackruiter yesterday. Nick agreed there's a chicken and egg problem where people expect you to have a ton of skills but the way you learn those is to go work at a startup. I thought it would be cool to have some sort of online tool for learning how to scale your site, and survive things like a sudden giant burst of traffic, data writes etc. So I'll look into writing an app to do that.
• I am trying to hire for Good Morning CMC. Hiring is really difficult. I'm pretty lazy, so for something like Good Morning CMC there are a few different scripts to automate things like deploying to the server, sending out the Snack menu every night (it's entirely automated, I don't have to do anything) or creating the email (so I don't miss closing HTML tags, etc). These scripts are good and help keep me sane; if I didn't have them it would take upwards of 2 hours to put the email together every night. But at the same time it makes the project complex. It's a Catch-22 where the students who could figure out the whole system without any problems are probably the ones who have better things to do, while the students who are pretty far away from figuring it out would take 2 hours a night, and possibly get discouraged.
• Mostly I just want someone to show initiative and do something like grab the source code, make a change and then upload it. Maybe that's not a good heuristic for a good candidate, but so far it hasn't happened.

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This is a lesson that’s probably for an audience of people who would not be reading this post, but on the off chance they read it, here goes:

1. Never use all capital letters. Especially in the email title.

2. If you’re going to send out images to 1200 people, figure out how to upload them to a server, then embed HTML code linking to your image in the body of your email, instead of sending them as attachments. When you add them as an attachment, the size of your email becomes massive, and you’re creating 1200 copies of the same file that sit in everyone’s inbox. Plus attachments can’t be read on a mobile phone.

3. You have roughly 80 characters for the message preview in most email clients. Try to communicate everything I’d need to know about your email in that space. If your email is short enough consider sending the entire message content in the subject line.

4. Never use more than one exclamation point.

5. Do not say your email is “High Importance” when it isn’t.

6. Double check your email for typos and factual content before you send it. Send a test email to yourself first. If you catch a mistake do everything in your power to avoid sending a second email. Followup “correction” emails are only appropriate if the recipient is Jack Bauer and the subject of the correction is the location of a nuclear bomb.

6b. Double check to make sure the recipient is correct. Be careful when the Reply-To email address differs from the From address. Do not ever confuse Reply and Reply All.

7. Try as hard as you can to limit your email to the appropriate audience; send to a class-specific listserv for example instead of the entire school.

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I will be on a panel Wednesday night, March 2, about “Breaking into the Silicon Valley Job Market” with 3 other seniors. The panel will be at 7pm in Bauer Founders Room at CMC.

I will also be speaking Thursday night, March 3, at the CMC Athenaeum about “Why Everything You Learned In Finance Class is Bullshit.” The dinner is sold out, but you can attend the talk, which begins at 6:45. I’ll post slides and notes as the date gets closer.

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The most ambiguous time for me is between 6 and 9 on Thursday through Saturday nights. If I'm around people, I'll go out. However if I'm in my apartment and haven't made plans it's really hard to leave. It's better to say yes to people right away, and turn them down later, than to be accurate about your future plans. I'm trying Rejection Therapy and currently on a 6-day streak. Keeping the streak alive is difficult and so is thinking of creative ways to get rejected. In the moment I usually don't recognize situations either, like the other night when I walked in to Subway at 10:05 even though it closed at 10 and they told me they were closed. Wrinkle free shirts are awesome, especially the non-iron ones from Brooks Brothers. (H/T Andy McKenzie's Delicious feed) I can't remember where I read it but I read that it only takes one bad impression for someone to judge you harshly, so instead of trying to excel, or stand out, you should focus simply on not making an ass of yourself. I've thought a lot about that lately. I have lots of opinions, but I especially enjoy sharing the ones that go against conventional wisdom. Most of my posts for the CMC Forum follow this trend. I've stopped writing for the CMC Forum in part because I'm not that interested in making people angry or impressing people through writing anymore. For all that I talk about the importance of practice, even though it can make you look like an idiot, I sometimes fail to practice enough myself, for fear of looking like an idiot. Practicing is especially important in the face of evidence that testing is the most effective way to learn, and most forms of practice are tests for how well you actually know the material. This is partly why I'm trying to stick with rejection therapy.

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Coming out of high school I had a great GPA, great SAT's, and great recommendations, but I was still a pretty weak candidate for college admission. How? I was puzzled too, when I was a senior and I got turned down from my top seven choices. The standard model for college admissions is this - you send your transcript, you take the SAT and hope for a good score, sign up for tons of activities, and write about the week long overseas community service trip that changed your life, and then you get in where you get in. The standard model is very deterministic; your SAT's and GPA more or less determine where you'll be able to get in. Here's the problem: Stanford gets 5000 applicants that look exactly like you every year, and they only have so many spots in their incoming class. Fortunately there's a way to beat the standard model, and pull way above your weight in terms of your GPA and SAT's, and that's through your activities. Specifically, you need to have impressive activities. Here's what I mean by impressive: if I could go out tomorrow and sign up for every activity you're doing, then your activities are not impressive, and won't impress a college admissions officer either. But, if you're doing crazy things, requiring a high amount of skill that I can't easily imagine myself doing, you have an impressive activity. ONE impressive activity will be your gravy train all the way through college. How do you get an impressive activity? First, if there's an activity you love doing, that you think about in the shower or that keeps you up at night, drop all your other activities and try to build an impressive level of skill in that one activity. If there isn't anything that gets you super excited, it's okay. Pick one of your activities at random, drop the other ones, and try to build an impressive skill level. One impressive activity is better than twelve crappy ones. If that doesn't sound particularly exciting for you, look for activities from your childhood you especially enjoyed, or for things people tell you you are exceptionally good at. For me, I've always been good at math, but I didn't try to excel or build my math skills, for fear of being pigeonholed. Your goal in picking extracurricular activities should be to try and become the best in California at something. Start a business, write for the Contra Costa Times, or learn how to program and contribute to Google Chrome. Are those activities unusual for someone your age? Of course. But you know what, so is being in the top 5% of applicants to Yale. So if you haven't figured out by now, I was a weak applicant because I didn't have impressive activities; I spent a lot of time playing sports (two different sports, go figure), and I wasn't good enough to earn a scholarship. In the past year I've done more cool stuff, and built up marketable skills, more than in the eight years before that put together. I just wish I'd started when I was your age.

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