I’ve been thinking about testing the limits of my abilities. The one thing I believe I’m lacking is an advanced degree. I do believe this blog and my writing prove that, at the very least, I am above average, as far as intelligence goes. I also believe that if I put my mind to it, I am capable of understanding any problem. My writing style, on the other hand, might make it seem that my thoughts are simple and superficial, no matter how much time I spent to think and study to arrive at them. And I guess that when compared with the thoughts of proper geniuses, they are. But when compared with average people, they are not. I am aware my vocabulary is not rich, for example, and this might give the reader the illusion that I’m a mediocre writer. I am more concerned with ideas, though, and the style with which I express myself is a second thought to me.
But anyway, completing a tough engineering degree would clear any doubt that I can think about and understand abstract problems, to anyone who doubts me. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone after having written already nearly 400 pages worth of content in this blog, but I have free time and going back to university could be one of the things I decide to do. The most annoying thing about university when I was a student was finding solutions to the various problems the teachers gave us. Whether I tried to solve old tests and exams, or whether I was just trying to solve homework, it was the rule to have to do a lot of digging to find the answers. Textbooks like Lay’s Linear Algebra and Its Applications were in my view an exception. You could really learn any field if all textbooks were written like that. It explained the theory in a clear language, gave practical problems for the reader to solve, and also the solutions to these problems. But then you had 400-page calculus textbooks that were unnecessarily deep, and practically gave you no problems to solve, let alone their solutions. You had to dig to get the answers for the problems the teachers gave you, and if you missed class, as I almost always did, you’d be pretty much screwed. I have no idea how I eventually passed my calculus course under these conditions. I think the internet and Youtube helped.
Which leads me to my next point. In an age where powerful chatbots like Chat-GPT exist, the idea of getting through an advanced degree does not seem so annoying anymore. Apparently, it is possible to just take a picture of a given math problem, upload it to the chatbot, and the model will then give you a detailed, step-by-step idiots guide on how to solve it. If I had tools like these back when I was in university, I’d probably have aced all my courses. Because again and again, my problem was that I had to open up 400-page, unnecessarily deep textbooks to find the solutions to a problem, and I couldn’t bother doing that because it was just too boring and even annoying for me.
So I don’t know. Next year I might enroll in university again, or maybe I won’t. It is a complicated decision to make because it would be a very time-consuming activity. Even with Chat-GPT, getting through an engineering degree would require pretty much my total focus, and I don’t know if I am willing to take 3 to 5 years of my life to do that. Because the only reason to go back to university would simply be to test the limits of my abilities.
The Stillest 