Take gen ed classes later, not sooner

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There is an attitude among many of my friends where they want to quickly “get over with” boring general education classes — like a required course on empirical and mathematical reasoning or metabolism and exercise. One friend likened it to “eating the frog” today rather than tomorrow. This attitude is puzzling to me, because the frog will be a lot smaller tomorrow! Gen ed classes will be less work if you take them in your final year, when you already have an offer letter in hand, so you don’t have to care as much about what grade you get.

I would recommend basically all underclassmen postpone gen ed classes for as long as they can. Wiser folks than me have said this before, so I will just echo their counsel.

Hear Trenton Bricken: 

The primary reason [for delaying gen ed] is compounding returns. Taking a higher level class a semester earlier than you otherwise would could be the difference between landing a competitive internship or not. Being more advanced in one subject can influence what other classes you take, final projects you work on, and how you see the world more broadly. This sounds dramatic and naive but there are fundamental mental models like learning how to think probabilistically that can really shape your future decision making. 

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I realize that for some, the general education requirements can be a source of direction and inspiration. If you don’t have any idea what you want to pursue then by all means take these classes. But those who have an idea of what they want to pursue should go forth and do it!

Most people underestimate compounding returns. Knowledge compounds. Taking a higher-level course a quarter sooner unlocks a whole raft of other courses, which in turn unlock more courses.

Postponing gen ed is a special case of a more general principle: you should postpone all time-wasting classes till your final year(s). If you’re chasing a career in ML and a difficult functional programming class you’re not very curious about can be put off, put it off! Yes, in some cases, taking that class could be a badge of honor among your peers that you’ll not get to wear. But I’m hoping you’ll replace that class with something you i) are genuinely curious about, and/or ii) expect will be more useful. The substitute should be exactly as challenging, just more worthwhile.

This quarter at Northwestern (Spring 2024), I’m not taking the traditional freshman spring courses: Engineering Analysis (EA; Newtonian dynamics with engineering applications) and Design Thinking & Communication (DTC; a 10-week project to design a physical product that meets a client’s requirements and write a bucket load of reports along the way). Instead, I’m taking Intro to Political Theory and Intro to Microeconomics. Both classes are extremely interesting — far more than a rehash of grade 11 physics and 10 weeks of writing fluff would have been — and one Joel Spolsky even considers essential to a programmer’s undergraduate education! 

Had I known that DTC and EA can be taken after freshman year, I wouldn’t have taken previous courses in these sequences last quarter, either. But still, I’m early. Almost none of my friends know that you’re allowed to take DTC after freshman year when I broach this topic. This is not surprising — Northwestern pushes DTC heavily as part of its “Engineering First” focus (whatever that means — for some reason an introduction to electrical engineering isn’t engineering-first). From their website: “[DTC] is a required two-quarter course for all first-year students at Northwestern Engineering.” But I’d have felt stupid for not even asking if delaying gen ed is possible, and ask my advisor I did — and now I have no plans to touch DTC and EA again until my very final quarter here.