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University of Virginia Student Graduates in One Year
An anonymous reader writes "18-year-old David Banh of Annandale, VA recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Physics and Mathematics, and an education paid for almost entirely by scholarships. What's truly amazing is that he did it in one year, bringing in 72 Advanced Placement credits, then taking 23 credits his fall semester, 37 credits his spring semester and 3 credits in the summer. His brief undergraduate career didn't leave him much time to explore college, so he's now working on his master's degree. He says he may eventually pursue law school as a part-time student in hopes of becoming a patent lawyer."
What he did:
Where he going:
What he wants to do:
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Counterpoint:
How he did it:
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Basically, it's a neat feat that took years to prepare for, like going through a process to be "pre-qualified", but he isn't quite Doogie.
Have you read my journal today?
Hurry!
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
And what does he want to be after he completes his education (he is now entering a math masters program)?
A patent attorney.
Jesus! I recently returned to finish my degree, and 18 hours plus 20 hours of working is kicking my ass a little bit.
...you have completely missed the point.
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.. he rushed through the technical stuff, and wants to jump into patent law.. sounds like a dig at the USPTO :) .. "I want to rush through stuff JUST LIKE THEM!".
There is A LOT more to college than the degree, hell - for most people thats an afterthought.
meh
What a slacker! But before I get modded troll, let me just say that I think more students could be graduating a lot sooner if useful classes were offered during the summer. A lot of summer semesters get wasted when out of state kids can't afford to go home for the summer and don't have any classes worth taking either.
Many IV league schools no longer accept AP credits. They want you to get an education from THEIR institution. If you enroll into a school with 72 credits, about half of your university education doesn't even come from the university you attended. This is why many schools are following the examples of the IV league institutions.
Part of the point of an undergraduate education is to be exposed to new ideas and concepts while you're establishing yourself in an environment separate from your parents and the babysitting culture of most secondary schools.
Somehow, I don't think he got very much exposure to new ideas and concepts. He sounds like someone who's decided that whatever makes the most money is the best thing to do with your life.
Regards,
Ross
It seems to me that this guys has missed the point of university. Yes, his feat is just short of miraculous and he is clearly a smart guys, but it sounds like he was there merely for the credential. Simply to get the degree. University is supposed to give someone a chance to explore the universes, or the parts that seem interesting. To experiment and experience things. Not to simply vacuum up credits. In a way, I am sorry for him.
So that's where neighbor's missing supply of crack went!
Sounds a bit odd to me -- where I go to school, many of the course plans are layered, so you have to take a lot of pre-requisites... I don't know if he got them waived via AP credit or what, but even in my last two semesters (I graduate in May, hurrah) I'm still knee-deep in 400 level classes that I have to take before I can take other 400 level classes.
Also, I think he missed the college experience. College doesn't teach you as much book-wise as it does real-life-wise: living on your own, those 3 a.m. conversations about philisophy with your friends, boobies... I'm taking 18 credit hours and working only 24 hours a week and I still have trouble finding time for fun... this kid is either a robot or has no social life (I don't "party" or drink, so I'm already "unsocial" to some people).
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Okay. 37 credits your spring semester. That's pretty much 9 AM to 5 PM in class, five days a week. Add in study time and prep time plus time to do assignemnts, and (judging by what I did carrying 15 credits at Penn State) he was working an additional 6+ hours a night, seven nights a week, for his classes. That's it. That was his life for a year.
See, to me, college was about learning first and foremost, about obtaining a well-rounded academic education. The key here is "well-rounded." If you're literally spending 13-14 hours a day on class, what else are you doing? Nothing. That's not well-rounded. This kid missed out on everything that makes college, college. Friends, relaxing...hell, dorm floor-wide LAN matches in CS and UT99 (as in my case). Oh, and football. Sweet, sweet football. On the other hand, I can guarantee you that he did nothing but eat, sleep, work, and study.
I'll take a party here and there and some video games, please. I would not do what this kid did, nor would I consider it, or consider letting my children (someday) do it. It's just flat out not worth it.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
I have spent some time demonstrating to undergrads engineering courses and several times I have seen some amazing students who take to the subject really well. They don't do perticulaly well in the other courses but they seem to enjoy this the course and they go beyond what is expected of them. Then at the end I ask them if they are going to do the engineering modules next year because they will be practically guaranteed top marks in those too and they say no because they want to: Write web pages for a living, Become lawers because they heard that pays well, Knows someone who works with Java and so will take only very soft modules (despite the fact that they failed the java module).
This guy has some real potential, he could change the world, he could discover some fantastic advancements for the good of human kind, but no. He wants to be a lawyer.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
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as I did with mine. I intentionally stayed in college 6 years*(1.5 of those were spent doing internships) because I wanted to explore everything there was. My AP credits allowed me to get a lot of stuff out of the way so I could explore. I took an internship at a steel mill and worked at an R&D Lab in Japan. I majored in computer engineering and minored in math and Japanese, and actually took a lot of other classes that I didn't have to take because I thought they were interesting. I have something like 32 credits that don't really "count" as it were, for my degree. I am sure as hell glad I took them though because I will probably never get another chance to take a class in world music or Japanese literature.
Those sure as hell don't help me on my job or in grad school next year, but I really felt like they helped me grow as a human being.
Monstar L
christ, i graduated with a single major (computer engineering) and i had to take 140 credits. all he had to take was 135 for two.
:(
where's my second degree?
Apparently he didn't have enough time for a minor in female anatomy.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
About one of my friends with a Math/Comp.Sci./Pol.Sci. who went on to be a very good patent attorney. "How anybody who understands math would go into law!"
I envy him coming from a school system that allowed him to get 72 AP credits. My high school, and every alternative within an hours drive, offered a grand total of SIX AP courses (including Music Theory, wtf?). They required you to take the class before you could take the test. And every one of them had pre-requisites within the normal high school curriculum, making all 6 an impossible combination.
I am also a bit skeptical about getting through all of college in what amounts to, at most, 5 'layers' of prerequisites, and that would be assuming he brought in two courses worth of AP credits in a particular subject (common at most institutions, a 5 on my AP Calculus exam got me credit for Calc I and Calc II), took another level of course in the fall and spring, and then took the final one as his single 3-hour summer course. All 3 of th universities I have attended had pre-requisite trees deeper than that for almost any normal degree, and more of them than would fit in his schedule anyways.
The double major in Physics and Math is a pretty smart choice, if I were to "twink" my college education like that. Most institutions allow AP credit to qualify for non-major related prerequisites (so you can focus on the "good stuff" instead of all that well-rounded stuff) and thus most of his high school AP credits may apply. A typical Math and/or Physics degree focuses on multiple subdisciplines that can be studied concurrently rather than in sequence. And, of course, a person with an aptitude in Math will find the coursework easy to digest and easy to take tests for (which inevitably involve solving problems rehashed in the coursework rather than coming up with novel solutions or proofs). In other words, if I was powerleveling through college (which is what he did), that's probably the route I would have taken.
Of course, with this current toon, I took the other route and only had 12 credit hour semesters and took a lot of extra-curricular cultural classes in music, literature, and sociology. Sometimes life is better when you stop and smell the roses.
...burns half as long? I worry about people who are so task oriented. I bet the guy gets anxious when he isn't working towards a deadline and has some free time.
If the coursework was that unchallenging to him, how did it take him until he was 18 to get through high school?
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
No doubt this guy has made some lucky meth dealer rich enough to retire.
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
After reading the article, I felt like I had a similar sort of high school experience as him (though not as crazy as him). I came to college with 48 AP credits, plus 8 from college courses. Technically speaking, I could've graduated in a year or two. But there's no point.
First, the physics/mathematics combination is not hard to do. At least where I went to school a physics major only needed a few more classes to get a math degree (because so much was required for physics). Second, I don't think one can truly appreciate physics by doing it all in one year. I doubt he took very many advanced courses. I learned a lot in intro physics (I had AP credit, but declined it to take an honors intro course) that I never learned in high school. And it always takes me a while to truly appreciate a subject. Not just one year. Plus I doubt he got much research experience in.
I'm sure he's a smart person and talented, but there are plenty of people like that out there. If he had tried doing that at a place like Caltech or MIT, I doubt it would've worked. Plus I actually enjoyed taking distribution classes because they gave me an interesting perspective I hadn't known before. In fact, I wish I had taken more of them.
Regardless, if you're thinking of doing this, don't. If you're that smart, go to a better school, spend the money, and be really challenged like this guy never was.
Maybe he can do the lawyer thing in a year and then become an astronaut, and train driver after that.
This guy hasn't missed the point of going to college. He got it right. He's taking advantage of the TIME VALUE OF MONEY. Facing the extreme price increases in tuition why not take as many transferable AP classes as you can. Then if you get someone else to pay for your collage that's even better. And instead of wasting 4 years of valuable time (where you could be making money instead of forking it over the university, landlords, beer vendors, or pot dealers you can get on with life and start doing what you want. The more you earn/invest today, the better off you will be tomorrow. The less debt you have today, the more you will have tomorrow.
Universities have become a money making shell game...they require you to take a load of irrelevant course work (to broaden your horizons) at over $300/credit then they offer limited sections of these classes which delays your graduation a semester or two. Yeah, the university has your educational interests at heart.
P226
I was going to say the exact same thing.
Racing through college like that just seems like wasted opportunities galore. Not only for the social interaction, which he almost certainly didn't get, but to take all sorts of other classes.
There are whole fields of study that I never would have had any clue about, except that I saw them in a course catalog when I was an undergrad and thought "what the hell, I'll take it." Economics, for example, is now a big interest of mine, and there's no way I would have taken it, if I had been just trying to bang out the minimum graduation requirements.
I wish this guy the best, but I think he's driving too hard and too fast for specialization. Even for a patent attorney, having some concept for things outside your area of interest is a good idea. That doesn't mean you need to take twelve credits of Underwater Basketweaving, just that there are a lot of things that you can learn about (particularly a big school like UVA), and it's a shame to pass up those opportunities, as they're rather difficult to come by later.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What math/physics degree allows you to graduate with only 120 credits, 72 of them things that can even be counted from AP exams?
My engineering degree took 200 credit hours, including about 45 that I entered college with. Taking 37 hours in a semester would save you... half a year over my normal course load.
I mean, so AP can cover your intro pretty much everything... meaning that few of his classes were actually something high level AKA possibly challenging? I had a year and a half worth of math courses beyond what you can get with all possible AP credits.
I mean, awesome for him... but what the heck is the university even teaching in a degree that short?
He obviously doesn't play World of Warcraft.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
I knew, the second I saw the headline, that it was a TJ grad. I could have easily spent another year at TJ after my senior year, and learned a hell of a lot more than I did during my first year (or two) of college. In fact, in my time at TJ (where I specialized in Physics), I learned more about computer science in passing than I have at the two universities I've attended for most of the past ten years (including a CS degree).
I'll be the first one to admit that chances are he missed out on a lot of fun college life, but sometimes you just have to do something "because you can". He's smart, and I'm sure he'll spend the next three or four years in grad school and law school, and he'll find time to have a little bit of fun while he's at it.
Congratulations to him, and remember, just because he's smarter than you (academically) is no reason to try and take away from his accomplishments just to make you feel better about yourself.
--brian, TJ '96
Just imagine how fast this guy will blow through the McDonald's training materials! He's got Assistant night shift supervisor written all over him...
Let's assume for a moment that this guy is actually brilliant, not just cramming stuff (which should be hard in a Maths course, but I don't know how the courses at this university are organised). Then the fact that he wants to be an attorney shows what a horribly shallow personality he must have.
I mean, a true genius would be eager to use his cognitive abilities for the advancement of mankind. Start an academic career, change the way we think about the world. Live in fancy old College rooms, sip on a glass of Port, write thoughtful books.
No, he doesn't want to do that. He wants to earn a lot of money. How sad.
Son, the point of going to college isn't knowledge. Anyone can pick up a book and learn.
The point of going to college is poon-tang. Pure and simple. Why do you think they make you take English literature classes? To learn what a boring read Emily Bronte really is? No, it's so you can speak meaningfully to the cutie who wears the green satin bra on Thursdays, and so you can find out exactly what is under that bra, son.
Now go learn something on a "collegiate level", or you will turn into a bitter old man.
I actually take pity on this kid. He was in such a hurry to get "to the next thing" he completely missed college.
Sad honestly. College is a nice 4-5 years of your life of with barely any responsibility and a hell of a lot of fun. What is waiting for you after college. Answer: a career, have fun with that for the next 50 or so years of your life, i dont think putting that on hold for a year is gonna matter much in the end.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Parallel comparison: I'm in Toastmasters (http://www.toastmasters.org/), an international organization promoting communcation and leadership skills. There's an educational program that takes an average person about five-seven years to compete. Numerically it boils down to about 55 speeches, a major project in leadership and mentoring about 23 people. The first part (10 speeches) takes about one to one and a half years. I felt like I raced through it in 10 months, but later I heard about someone really racing through it in 10 weeks. I met that person and discovered that they had definitely missed the point. He was not a skilled speaker at all and could barely understand all of the meeting roles or the opportunities for service to the organization beyond the club level yet he had achieved the first level of education.
Indirect comparison: World of Warcraft power-levelers (or any game with specific goals). The people who play a single character to level 60 and they're "done." They quit and state "I've seen and done it all." Completely missed the point. The game, like school or professional organizations, is comprised of a great deal more than a simple ladder for reaching the "top." These people miss out on so much content, relationships and experience. I'd compare them to someone who goes to a buffet, tries a single bite of each item and calls that dinner.
Where is this coming from? Has our sense of achievement been condensed to "do the minimum requirement as fast as possible?" I guess it's the opposite end of the spectrum of people, companies and communities that are so laid back that they see no reason to change anything at all ever.
I am envious of Banh that he obviously has a high IQ and the ability to absorb a great deal of information quickly, though I wonder how long he can retain it. Patent lawyer? What a waste of a good brain.
That said, there aren't many times, other than college, in your life where you are as free to experiment, try new things, and "open your wings". Learning about yourself and growing as a person (being social is a HUGE part of this) are the most important parts of college. Being successful (and happy) in life isn't always about what or how much you know. It is very often about how you present yourself (social skills) and who you know. College is a critical networking and personal growth opportunity.
I'm really sad to read this. One can experiment and try new things and 'open wings' long after college is over. When you're in college people often say "these are your best years." That always made me sad when I was in college. It wasn't that I didn't have a good time in college--it was absolutely wonderful--but I was only twenty years old! I didn't want my best times to be over when I (hopefully) had at least sixty years left!!
Good thing people were wrong. I'm still growing, spreading my wings, and trying new things. I hope that life only gets better.
Penny - plain text accounting
http://www.donarmstrong.com
First, I was a double math/physics major in high school; and am currently in my final year of doing a Ph.D. in maths. For the sake of this post not getting that 'jealous' tone; I will say, my academic performance has been good enough where I am currently funded by an international research scholarship (international competition with only 50 or so granted a year). Specifics aren't important as I'm not about to get into an acadmic pissing contest with the person in the article. I will say, I went through the American university system a few years ago; and have been teaching math/physics discussions, reviews and full-blown lectures on and off for the past 7 years or so.
First, this guy (in all likelyhood) is not a genius, as many have said. I agree with those who say that he found a system and exploited the hell out of it. This isn't all bad I believe; I did similar things with AP credits and course overloading. Although, I didn't do it NEARLY to this extent because I wanted to get something out of my education. The only shocking thing here is the Univ. of Virg. actually let this happen; anyone looking at this with some idea of technical education/teaching will regard this as an indication of horrific educational standards at Univ. Virg.
I don't care how smart you are there is no way someone will effectively assimilate the level of maturity to be effective in the areas of maths/physics after one year of Uni. study. There is something in education that is really never mentioned, that I refer to as 'subject maturity'. One can still do text book problems and tests in a subject and still have no maturity in it. Maturity is a reflection of original intuition and effective assimilation to the knowledge base already present in a person. To make this more clear, I'll put out a few stages. Stage 1: you can regurgitate what was read and nothing more. Stage 2: you can work problems if they are identical to problems you've seen worked before. Stage 3: you can work new problems that are based off of combining techniques from solving problems you've seen before. Stage 4: you can work simplier problems in the subject which may be completely different than other problems you've seen. There are obviously higher stages; but a bachelors degree rarely gets someone beyond stage 4. This guy is at stage 2; I'd bet money on it. I've seen so many 'hot shot' students who are REALLY good at working the algorithmic process of solving problems they already know; but have no creative ability in the subject whatsoever... grade chasers. Anyway, the article seems to reflect that this guy is simply chasing grades/recognition; I highly doubt he's in it for the deeper understanding. I bet within 6 months 80-90% of what he's learned will be gone. Also, to base so many credits in math/physics off of high school credit is laughable. There isn't even to mention the violation of logical progression in these subjects. You're telling me this kid was doing Quantum Field Theory as he was learning electromagnetism or general realativity before having any idea about pdes? This just doesn't make sense. Again, I am amazed Univ. of Virg. has such lax course requirements. Either that, or he simply was allowed to bypass many of the higher level courses all together. Either way, it doesn't bode well for the Uni. of Virg.'s educational standards.
That all being said, I believe he will have to spend at least another few years as a student. Any decent employers, graduate school is probably going to laugh at a CV outlining one year of study. I know he's been accepted by the Univ. of Virg. into a masters program; but I bet that's because no other decent Univ. would touch him with a 10 foot pole (it is usually discouraged to do a grad degree the same place you do undergrad).
I said 'not again' because I thought that decade or so when people were ooed and awed by the teenage college grads was over, when it was realized how poorly these graduates performed when put to further studies or into jobs. Oh well, I guess some people will always be impressed by the newest 'good will hunting'.