One year ago, I was preparing for my first year of undergrad. Today, I’m considering dropping out. What changed? Before writing this post, I attribute my decision to variety of (unordered) reasons: Short timelines: I believe rapid takeoff ( Bandwidth: School is a major bottleneck on my bandwidth. I think [1] my time is more valuable spent on some subset of {organizing, research, building context, working}. Academia is Underprepared: I believe AI will be highly transformative. I’m doubtful that the current curriculum at my university will impart foundational skills that hold up for the rest of my life in a post-AGI (or post-ASI) world, especially as a CS major. Peer Pressure: A lot of the people I take seriously are planning on/recommend dropping out. This signals to me that dropping out is something I should consider seriously. This is a pretty important decision. I’m not super confident in my motivations, so I’m writing this post to hash out exactly why (or why not) dropping out is the right decision to make. I’m posting it because 1) getting feedback from others is the fastest way to test my ideas, and 2) this could be helpful for someone in the same position as me. Thanks to Zephy Roe, Ishan Khire, and Naren Manikandan for comments, and my sister, Anish Kallu, and Meru Gopalan for relevant discussion. My perspective on the different levels of dropping out I’m somewhat against viewing university as a binary choice, i.e. either I enroll or drop out. A more intuitive perspec…

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