Ask HN: At 34, do I go back to college or not?

Since you certainly have the discipline to pull self-study off, I would suggest emailing a professor teaching undergraduate classes in Mechatronics or Embedded Systems at Stanford, Cornell or Carnegie Mellon. They have very solid programs in robotics as they are always big contenders in the DARPA grand challenges. Get a syllabus and buy the books. When I took those classes, it was a lot of self-study anyways with our primary reference being The Art of Electronics and a bunch of AVR processor manuals. If you live in San Jose / Santa Clara area there are some GREAT electronics depots where you can stroll up and walk away with a bunch of servo motors for under $20 and start hardware-hacking.<p>Don't go back to school though. I think its a bit overkill. Having a PhD you already possess the skills to find the right resources and just begin doing what you want...no need to relearn the theory (unless that is half the fun for you). To address the isolation concern, I would suggest to find a hardware company (perhaps medical) that you could intern at. Try and find a mentor who can show you the ropes quicker than if you were to be by yourself.

Can't you go for a Master's in CS or Robotics or something? I know people with math/science backgrounds but no CS-backgrounds doing their CS Master's here at UCSD. It sounds like a lot of scrambling to catch up, but probably the best bang for your buck.

This is going to sound a bit presumptuous, but with your background, you might be able to get to market much quicker if you approached some life sciences VCs first. They may be able to introduce you to someone who can handle the CS side, give you a little money to get started, and avoid some pitfalls along the way.<p>I don't remember the names of early stage life sciences VCs off the top of my head, but if you're interested, I'd be happy to do some digging this weekend for you.

Anybody reading this site knows that college is not a necessary step on the way to entrepreneurship, including you.<p>But less talked about it is the "journey" part.<p>As long one is in touch with personal motivations and goals, then college seems fine.<p>You're in no rush, financially comfortable, and as eager for experiences as you are your innovative product. I'd say college sounds like a cool idea. I'd just be careful to pick a good program, otherwise it could be painful/frustrating.<p>I'm about to go to college part-time with no professional necessity at all. I'm in a different spot than the OP. I don't have a first degree. But I do have a fine geeky career that I'm about to step out of to start a business (way less capital intensive than his idea :D ), and am going to college with the <i>hope</i> of learning a subject matter, but no real expectations. Just mostly for the experience.

Just get some books and start hacking. That's all they use to teach you with in college anyway, except they charge you a metric crapload to do it.<p>"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a narrow field." -Niels Bohr

Hey! Having just finished a CS degree and after thoughtful consideration, if I had the opportunity to go back in time and do it over again, I wouldn't. I think that I could have covered all of the material in far less time on my own and used the extra time to develop my skills as a programmer. With all of the exams and assignments that occupy so much time in University, I think that your time would be better spent writing programs that interest you and reading other people's code as well. University will teach you the basics, but without much practice, it's of very little value. Furthermore, I gather from your post that you'd be studying for the benefit of starting your own company. As a result, you obviously don't need that piece of paper certifying that you know what you know. Conversely, if you thought that you might eventually seek employment with another company, the CS degree is (unfortunately) important just to get a look at your c.v.<p>This is just one man's opinion. Let me know what you decide.

I think you'll be fine with self-study. The way you get feedback is to iterate and share your work with other people. Build a small robotics project, find your favorite robotics-related community / fourm, post "look at my robot, my robot's amazing", and wait for the feedback. Then do that again.<p>Eventually, you'll develop a sense of what's right and wrong (from your own experience and looking at other people's work), and then you'll have the tool you need to do the project you actually want to do -- experience and intuition.<p>It reminds me of that essay, "Teach yourself programming in ten years". You can't read a book and become an instant expert. You have to read books AND fail for yourself AND learn from your failures and success. You aren't going to get this skill in college, you can only get it with your own practice.

You can learn the mechanics and electronics yourself. You have time, money for equipment and books, and all the background and maturity you need. If you find that going it alone leads to frustration, pay a starving grad student $30 an hour to help you out once in a while. I don't say this knowing anything about mechanics and electronics; I just know that school will be too slow for you and won't actually help much. School is for people who need to prove (to themselves and others) that they aren't just dicking around. Since you've got a PhD <i>and</i> financial security, people are going to assume that whatever you're doing in your workshop, you aren't just wasting your time, and even if you are, you've earned the right.<p>Don't sweat the difference between Lisp and Python. Python interfaces to C and has large, mature, and popular scientific computing libraries. I would actually recommend learning Lisp (for the usual reasons) and using it as you pursue whatever CS learning you need, but don't be surprised if you end up using Python for practical work because of the libraries and the large community of people doing scientific computing.

I'd say go with #2 (technical college), to learn how to program micro-controllers with sensors and actuators, and have hands-on experience with equipment.<p>That will give you a view-from-the-bottom perspective on CS; perhaps then you'll figure out if you need to climb to the top.

If you have time and disposable income, why not self-study with a tutor to guide you? Not entirely sure of the best way to go about finding one, but it would at least cut out some of the disadvantages of the self-study route.

Unless you really have a passion for learning, I'd say it's not worth it. Are you really going to take a risk and go back to college so that you could take even more risk by doing a startup? Are you sure you can't/don't want to take on other roles besides being the hacker?<p>I guess it ultimately depends on how comfortable you are. Whatever you do, try doing it the "lean" way. Try taking one or two classes first without jumping into pursuing a degree. A lot of universities allow concurrent enrollment so you'd just take a class alongside regular students if they have room. Good luck.

I think a 1-year MS in some kind of engineering from a school with hands-on classes would do the trick. I did this at Stanford coming from a similar semi-technical background, and it was great. I think a class like ME218 at Stanford teaches you a nice mix of electrical, mechanical, and software. Video of a recent final project: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukxm54MhrIk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ukxm54MhrIk</a>

You have really specific ideas which makes me think you can self study. Institutional learning can be wider focussed and might not be as useful.<p>1) I would suggest starting the business right now. You have a day job and can bank roll it the initial stuff. Give yourself a budget and maybe a time and place to work on it? Do you have time to study on the side?<p>2) Next, find the type of customer that you want to work with and start seeing what you can find on the market to fit their needs. This way you can find a niche. Is it kids, adults, veterans? Is it mobility, seeing, hearing, etc?<p>3) Start researching the sort of things that are being created. (ex: The walking robots, robot cars, etc.) Maybe start communicating with researchers directly. You might end up finding one to study this exact thing with.<p>4) Try to connect a technology you can replicate with customers that you want to help and figure out what needs to be done to connect the two. You may even start just by helping people with off the shelf products and improving them.<p>This can be a good time to put together a business plan if you need funding to pull it off. You may also find yourself just building a series of prototypes in your spare time.<p>Enable a few kids to walk and money will find you.

Gee, I'm 34 and I'm planning to go back to school for a Masters in robotics next year (I'm a Mech Eng graduate).<p>I sure wish I'll run into someone like you when I'm done with my Masters.<p>For now, may I suggest you check out the Springer Handbook of Robotics for an excellent wide overview of the field, both in theory and applications. Maybe seeing it laid out like that will help you decide where you want to go with it.

2 or 4 sound like your best options, more likely 4. Remember, you don't <i>have</i> to do everything yourself; maybe a year or two spent learning the basics would give you both a good foundation for the project, and the opportunity to meet, evaluate and recruit other people who may have better ME/EE skills than you, but not your clinical expertise.<p>Or as you say it's 'basically a solved problem', maybe you can just find someone and work together. Just lsat week I was recommending HN to someone with a Mech eng degree and who has family manufacturing contacts in Asia to get on HN because he's a great hardware hacker but doesn't enjoy programming so much. Depending on your location, I bet you could assemble a small research team here on HN fairly easily. I wish you good luck with it, as giving mobility to people who've lost limbs or similar is a very worthy pursuit.<p>As for the headline question of 'college in 30s' I say sure. I turn 40 this year and am returning to study, which will be a 4-5 year process.

What about option 5:<p>Learn while doing, or more specifically while someone else does and teaches you. You're clearly highly skilled in your technical niche why don't you find someone else with complimentary skills (mechanics, electronics and computer science) and partner with them. You can start building your business immediately in the time that you have and as part of the partnership each teach the other. I know that as a hacker having the opportunity to work with a real specialist in another field and for us both to teach each other would be a massively satisfying experience.<p>You get two benefits the way I see it 1) You can start building your startup now 2) You get the two skilled specialists to work on it and share the excitement<p>I see the only drawback is that you don't get to go and spend a few years learning a new thing without any commercial pressure. If this is about learning how to be a hacker that's bad but if you're really into the startup thing then you save yourself a lot of time.

Additional degree on top of a PhD and MD is ridiculous when there are so many books and internet resources readily available.<p>Most university engineering programs are not hands on enough for this and will be a waste of time. You really need a facility like www.techshop.ws and access to a bunch of people who need limbs.<p>Just start building the prosthetic and learn what you need as you go. You might find that you don't even like doing the hands on stuff in which case going to school would be an even bigger waste of time.<p>John Carmack did not go to school for either computer programming or rocket science and has done alright in both fields. Dean Kamen also has no degree and invented insulin pumps, wheelchairs, the segway, the "luke" arm, etc...

I suggest a combination of 1 and 3. Get into a BME or BCE program and drop out after two years; at this point, you should have the foundations for which you could start to build your startup and proceed with your self study on the side to further your education.<p>My thoughts are that you are financially stable to afford the formal education, but you are limited by time - once you finish up a 4-5 years degree, that puts you are almost 40. I mean, your life is far from over but I assume that your priorities will change. Instead of thinking about your startup, you would probably be thinking about your children's educational future.

I would skip college since a degree is just an excuse to get the foot in the door for job interviews.<p>If you are good at motivating yourself to learn you don't need it. Also most colleges you can just attend the lectures for free anyhow, you only pay if you need the degree. Just get some books on the subject, and find an online community to bounce your ideas off and your set. That way you can learn at a faster pace and not be dragged down by the speed at college.

Dude, I was an Emerg doc. I just finished the 5 year diagnostic radiology residency and I am starting an interventional radiology fellowship. I am married with small kids.<p>Don't go back to school for 5 years. The price you pay with respect to not seeing your kids grow is too high.<p>Follow the self-study route. You can always hire technical people to assist you.<p>Here is another perspective: If you live a comfortable life and have a beautiful family, why not enjoy them?

Rather than going it alone it sounds like you ought to be partnering with someone. Studying IT even at a higher level courses aim at giving you a grounding in the subject, I'd imagine you want to target the pieces that you are interested in. Better to form a team with the skills that you need and learn from one-another.<p>I'm no expert on this, but isn't the role of a design agency to advise on these sorts of problems?

Maybe you can offer to work for free in a university robotics department as a staff programmer while taking courses or learning on your own. You probably won't be able to contribute much at first, but being able to learn with that social support is important, especially in an area where there is little in the way of autodidactic textbooks.

I'm studying for an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at the moment. My course consists primarily of electrical and mechanical engineering with medical science, biomechanics, some chemistry, et cetera. I can code pretty well. This sounds like a really interesting project. Definitely keep me posted as you progress.

I'm a big fan of self-study, but since you already have a PhD, it seems like you'd be quite comfortable learning in a classroom environment. Perhaps you can audit some classes in basic electronics and computer science? That should be a bit cheaper and could dovetail nicely into your self-study.

Well where are you in the world? I would definitely suggest rolling by your local hackerspace and looking for some assistance in getting yourself motivated, and navigating the harrowing experience of building out your own tool collection / parts collection as well as some of your skills.<p>Sourcing components and tools as a hobbyist, garage inventor, or even small design firm is very different from sourcing parts as a large institution or as an enterprise. The factors of scale change the playing field drastically. Many of the smaller kit builders and maker types have a shared knowledge regarding this sort of limited run development that you are endeavoring to pursue.<p>That being said, the key benefits for you that a major scholastic environment can provide you outside of tutelage is access to a robust machine shop, capable electronics facilities, and more important than all of that... protection from litigation in the patents you file.<p>Many graduate and even undergraduate programs offered by major universities actually will stipulate that any patent you file while at school, regardless of whether it's a personal patent or something completely unrelated to school, will be protected by them, their legal war chest, and their patent warchest. This is a huge selling point for some schools. ASK ABOUT IT.<p>Also, many schools have start up incubators of their own, or a network of people who can help you find funding. A friend who left stanford graphics lab took advantage of their start up program where they offer you use of facilities and space on campus in return for a percentage stake in the venture... they also will provide you with assistance in using their alumni network to score capital.<p>These are just some immediate thoughts. But I definitely see some values in going back to university that have no relevance to the actual classes you might take, but more with getting things done in your R&#38;D.<p>Definitely regardless of what you decide your level of commitment is, don't get discouraged. There are far too few people with medical certification and experience turning their eyes towards prosthesis and other technologies that assist the disabled. And while there's money to be made there, more importantly there is a lot of good that can be done. The things that help someone who is confined by their disabilities can be for more huge to the people who use them, than us.<p>I know a number of engineers, good ones that would be interested in helping people the way you are suggesting. It's a job that one can draw immense satisfaction from.

You could find a CSE student or a hardware engineer looking to switch focus into orthopedic surgery or medicine; the idea being you two would learn from each other and pass on valuable connections and resources gained from past experience.

Read the Art of Designing Embedded Systems by Ganssle. Lots of good info on his website as well.<p>This should give you more information on which to base your decision.

I know someone who might be interested in chatting with you. Do you mind throwing up your email in your profile?

if you want to learn something, it's better to learn it by yourself. School is aimed at the lowest common denominator and is aimed at finishing a small portion of curriculum during the semester. And since most classes are 3-4 credits, at most you'll be paying to learn something 3-4 hours a week.<p>While on your own time, you can dedicate 30-40 hours a week on your studies.

so ok...<p>#2 this is a waste of time for someone with your intelligence imho #3 - yep, too long #4 - possibly, if you're not a self directed learning type.<p>I would vote for #1, if you've already got a PhD the you have what it takes to pull it off.<p>As I understand it, you want to work on robotics. Very many of my friends who do research in robotics got their start playing with lego mindstorm robots. This would probably be a good place to start, because you basically can't learn software dev without writing something and it will give you a firm grasp of the basics of writing software for robots.<p>It's not clear what your level of experience in writing software is, if you haven't gone through basic tutorials then there are plenty of those out there.<p>If you happen to read this post and there's one thing to take away, it's that the absolute most important thing for ramping up to high productivity quickly is that you have a really solid infrastructure. The reason is that without such an infrastructure, codebases tend to drift and you can write yourself into a corner very easily.<p>I'll speak to my java infrastructure as this is my primary background.<p>First, I'm a big proponent of IDEs especially for beginners. I really like java with eclipse (it's unbearable with notepad) because with autocomplete and source code generation, you end up with code that reads more like an essay than a mathematical proof, which suits my personal style just fine. It just helps to offload my memory into autocomplete. Whatever editor you pick, it's extremely helpful to read up on it in advance.<p>Next is source code management. I personally use git and I create a repository for every project I'm working on, I find the distributed, self contained nature amusing. Commit often and branch when you change features.<p>Next up is managing dependencies. I use maven, which I absolutely love. Maven basically centralizes your dependencies and separates that concern to help avoid dependency hell. Some people use maven to manage their source, but I do it the opposite way with the maven files inside the directory where I create the git repo.<p>You also have to manage your own source. It's fine to play around ignoring all this, but once you have "real" code - this means code that you must maintain - then it's important that it be of a certain quality. You should try to have each project capture a particular need (read OCR or access a neural net or calculate some geo stuff for your robots or whatever) and that each product stand alone as much as possible. There should also at least be some functional tests.<p>imho, a relatively inexperienced dev with such a nice environment can be as productive as experienced devs flying by the seat of their pants. It also vastly reduces the risk of catastrophe.

Are you talking about robotics for making prostheses, or robotic prostheses? The latter will require considerably more and more specialized knowledge: control systems and signal processing, switching power converters, radio shielding, etc.<p>Programming these days tends to involve a lot of gluing libraries together. Python in general has much more extensive libraries than Lisps and Schemes. (The Python claim to fame is "batteries included".) Python also has excellent support for using libraries written in C and Fortran, which are the dominant languages for numerical modelling and math code.

Don't you have good institutes near you (not exactly colleges/universities) who teach basic of CS. Where I live there are pretty decent institutes (only if you can find them) who have courses on anything college teaches. These are much more focused on you than on the course as there are probably only 8 to 10 people in the class.You can also adjust timing and learning speed. But the down side there would be most of the students there are not of the brighter pool of students.

This post sounds bogus. So you have a PhD and an MD and you cant figure out whether should go to a community college or spend even more time in school playing with robots (if you are really an MD, you probably just finished your residency a few years ago at 34). ....hmmmm...sorry, dont mean to be rude but I dont buy it. If you are legit then a PhD in biomaterials is already plenty and with tons of free time, that is the perfect setup to do a startup....just do it!