Should I Finish My Bachelor's Degree?

I still don't get why you are even considering finishing the degree, even though you clearly tried to explain it to me. Taking eight college classes is a lot of work actually? "Why not" doesn't really seem to cover it. How is doing a "terrible" commute several times per week for two semesters and spending many hours per week a low cost?

You sort of imply that someone is judging you for not having the degree but you didn't give any examples of actually being judged.

If you really really want to prove to yourself that you can do it, or if you really want to learn more math (I agree that taking college courses seems like a fine way to learn more math) then I understand, but based on your post it's not clear to me.

That's ... a lot.  And a lot of extremely diffuse inferred judgments from statistical or imagined others, rather than specific people (including yourself) who will care about it.  

You're absolutely right that the signaling game has enough truth behind it that it's generally best, for most people, to just follow.  You're forgetting that you're not most people, and it's quite possible that structured undergrad education is way harder for you than for most people with your IQ.   Some will judge you for that.  Most won't care. 

On a practical side, it is a hurdle.  I dropped out of college long ago, it slowed my career by a fair bit for the first decade, but stopped mattering at all once I had significant job successes.  However, I've just changed jobs, and even with significant time with Principal and Distinguished Engineer titles, I had to get my prospective new boss to change their req to say "or equivalent experience" on the job description or HR wouldn't let me interview.  And my background check took extra time because they had trouble verifying my HIGH SCHOOL transcript. 

So, I can't answer for you.  The costs (in terms of emotional work) are likely higher than you say, but you may be enough of a different person that they're not all that high. The benefits are real, but most of them are intangible, and far more about how you think of yourself than how others see you. 

On the angle of demonstrating that you can learn the material and the skills and generally proving your math mettle: Can you study the books, do a sampling of the problems in the back of each chapter until you think you've mastered it, and then take the tests directly, without being signed up for a class?  Maybe find old exams, perhaps from other institutions (surely someone somewhere has published an exam on each subject)?  Or, for that matter, print out copies of old Putnam contests, set a timer, and see how well you do?

As someone who never entered college in the first place, I consider it a prosocial thing to make college degrees less correlated with competence.  Don't add to the tragedy of that commons!

I’m probably typical-minding a bit here, but: you say you have had mental health issues in the past (which, based on how you describe them, sound at least superficially similar to my own), and that you feel like you’ve outlived yourself. Which, although it is a feeling I recognise, is still a surprising thing to say: even a high P(doom) only tells you that your life might soon have to stop, not that it already has! My wild-ass guess would be that, in addition to maybe having something to prove intellectually and psychologically, you feel lost, with the ability to do things (btw, I didn’t know your blog and it’s pretty neat) but nothing in particular to do. Maybe you’re considering finishing your degree because it gives you a medium-term goal with some structure in the tasks associated with it?

I went back to finish college as an adult, and my main surprise was how much fun it was. It probably depends on what classes you have left, but I took every AI class offered and learned a ton that is still relevant to my work today, 20 years later. Even the general classes were fun -- it turns out it's easy to be an excellent student if you're used to working a full work week, and being a good student is way more pleasant and less stressful than being a bad one, or at least it was for me.

I'm not sure what you should do necessarily, but given that you're thinking about this less as useful for anyone in particular and more for other reasons, fun might be a good goal.

As it happened I think the credential ended up useful too, but it was a top school so more valuable than many.

Plainly, being able to poke holes in the idea of the degree system doesn't make you immune from the socio-emotional effects of not having a degree in a society that values degrees.

This is one of those cases where it might be useful to list out all the pros and cons of taking the 8 courses in question, and then thinking hard about which benefits could be achieved by other means.

Key benefits of taking a course (vs. Independent study) beyond the signaling effect might include:

• precommitting to learning a certain body of knowledge
• curation of that body of knowledge by an experienced third party
• additional learning and insight from partnerships / teamwork / office hours

But these depend on the courses and your personality. The precommitment might be unnecessary due to your personal work habits, the curation might be misaligned with what you are interested in learning, and the other students or TAs may not have useful insights that you can't figure out in your own.

Hope that helps.

School degree may not be a strong signal, but it is legible. If I don't know math, I have no idea whether your math articles make sense, or you're a crackpot. If I don't know programming, I have no idea whether your commits are good. But everyone knows what "I have a degree" means. So basically, school degree is better for "impressing a lot of people a little bit", while the things you did are better for "impressing a few people a lot". Neither is strictly superior to the other.

School typically tries to teach you a lot of things. You could learn any of them much better on your own, but it is unlikely that you would learn all of them, because there is too much knowledge out there. University-educated people will probably judge the knowledge they learned at university as elementary, so from their perspective, you have many gaps in elementary knowledge, which seems bad, even if you have deep knowledge in something else.

And there will always be the question: "if you are smart enough to succeed at school, why didn't you?"

So... if getting the degree is cheap, obviously go for it.

I think once you're past a certain basic level in math, it's feasible to continue learning pretty much by yourself, just download problem sets and go through them. But it's a bit lonely. Going to classes lets you meet other people who are into the same thing as you! Shared love for something is what makes communities happen, I got this idea in Jim Butcher of all places. And the piece of paper itself is also quite nice, it can come in handy unexpectedly, and getting it now is probably easier than getting it later. So on the whole I'd lean toward getting the degree.

About the philosophical stuff, I think "the world and/or my life will be over soon anyway" is kind of a nasty idea, because it makes you feel like nothing's worth doing. That's no way for a human being to be! You're not a potato! Hence it's better to act on the assumption that neither the world nor your life will be over anytime soon.

Woah. I am in a very similar circumstance. Back when I was in college, my ADHD and depression weren’t yet diagnosed and treated. As a result I never finished the last two semesters of a Computer Engineering degree. I never really cared about hardware, and really should have gone for Computer Science, but I bowed to family pressure.

I have been writing code since 1983 when I was six years old, in one form or another. Like you, I became a software engineer. I feel super lucky to be one of those people who turned their hobby into their job, while still enjoying it as a hobby. I’m constantly learning, and likely spend at least an hour or so every day reading about new systems and ideas.

Also like you, I have hit a point in my career where I am paid well, and can afford to pay for classes.

Also like you, I want to study mathematics. Those classes were always my favorite in school. I have been focusing on learning Category Theory for a while, and I’d really like to go deeper, but short of a graduate degree program, that is becoming more difficult.

So it’s got me thinking. I would love to get a mathematics degree, but really for pure person enrichment. I love my job, and where I work. I’m not trying to change careers. Since I already met all of the requirements for a math minor, I doubt it would be too much more to get the BS, and then I could start on a graduate program.

I used to be a math tutor in college, helping students learn up to Calculus 3 and differential equations. I’m out of practice, for sure, but I have retained a good bit of it. I expect that I might struggle a little with the first class or two that I take just because I’m out of practice. I’m already spending time watching lectures, and reading, so I am fairly certain that I can fit it into my life.

Yet, I keep coming back to the question, “Why?” I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t need the status. I have the knowledge and experience to get any job in my industry. I’m good at what I do.

I have only been seriously contemplating going back to school for the past year. So far I’m mostly balking at the return on investment, given the time investment it will take. My son is 13 years old, and so I likely have less than a decade before he is on his own, and I’ll have even more time.

I also am considering it as my retirement plan. I can’t imagine sitting idle. I need projects. Once I am retired, and no longer need to work, then I can spend that time on personal enrichment. Spending my golden years working on a PhD in mathematics, while making contributions to OSS sounds positively dreamy.

As long as my brain holds out, of course. My aunt died of Alzheimer’s, so that’s a possible future for me. I’m 46, and so far, and I feel like my brain is doing just fine. ADHD makes things complicated and chaotic at times, but in terms of intellectual adaptability and cleverness, I feel as good as I did in my 20s.

So yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll wait until I can have a full AI tutor and research assistant, and just eschew university altogether. Maybe this will remain an idle fantasy. Maybe I’ll find a community of folks that are in a similar place, and we’ll explore mathematics in some non-traditional setting. I don’t know yet.

Anyway, I feel ya, bro. If you decide to do it, I’d love to hear how it’s going. Maybe it’ll give me the kick in the butt that I need.

That does look like a rough commute, the kind that can use up the mental energy you want to spend on learning. One thing you could consider is staying in a hotel overnight near your school sometimes.

Also, consider wearing ear protection on the Transbay Tube. I wish I had done that when I commuted that way for a year.