===== UNIVERSITY AND ITS SOCIAL BENEFIT: my experience ======

I'm a Dutch person who went to both universities in Amsterdam.

I know people who now work at:

- McKinsey

- Google

- Adyen (not anymore)

- The Dutch television

- The biggest Dutch bank

Don't get me wrong. It's hard to get a job that I want, because apparently I can't get a job at those great companies (prepping hardcore for Google at the moment, so who knows). And I'm not utilizing my network in the right way. But I do get to get a glimpse inside some of them.

Besides that, I have met a person who helped me a shit ton financially, spiritually and intellectually. I've done the same for him (though less financially, unfortunately, but if the roles were reversed, I'd have done what he did). While he never went to a big name company, it definitely helped (more than anything else really).

Did I count on it? No. Did I meet him during the first day of uni? Actually, seven days prior to the first day of uni (1 week non-stop partying first).

So there's that.

===== THE UNIVERSITY EXPERIENCE =====

Also, I've experienced more or less everything a university has to offer, doing 2 bachelors and 2 masters + extracurriculars + student societies help with that.

In a big way it did mature me a lot. I was different than most though, in the sense that I always did multiple studies and things at once. I wasn't beholdened to one "student identity". I was never a psychology or CS student, I was always both or more.

In all fairness, high school was simply a prison. University felt more like a city, anything was possible. And more or less everything did come true.

Here's a small selection:

- Horrible education

- The best spiritual lessons that any other person could ever teach me. The course was called: meditation and psychology, and it was a 75:25 mix of theology (Buddhism during the centuries, emphasizing meditation) and psychology/cognitive science of meditation. Before this course I had issues with meditation. After this course, I knew how to deal with all of them despite that they were never directly addressed.

- The most epic parties,

- And some pretty boring ones

- Easy yet super interesting lessons, one was about the supply chain of a video game

- Hard lessons that weren't useful and simply wasted time

- Education that made me believe I was too stupid, only to persevere and realize that, to my surprise, there is no such thing. There is only perserverance, for my situation anyway. That was really empowering. What's currently less empowering is that potential employees don't seem to understand this.

- Fickle friendships

- Deep friendships

- Shallow loves

- 3+ year relationships

- Lots of wasted opportunity costs

- Amazing synergies that proppeled my education and job prospects (currently definitely not though)

Don't get me started on my 5 theses. To close, it was everything: epic, painful, mundane, joyful, sad, enriching, numbing, stimulating. I can keep on going, I'll stop.

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For anyone who's interested, here's how they went:

- One master thesis was written in a weekend, published nominated for best paper award.

- Another master thesis took 6 months and completely failed (I'm not the best at qualitative research)

- My computer science thesis was the culmination of all my theses and it showed. It took a bit longer than normal and I had an attitude with academic references across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy (not that I know that much, I'm simply more T-shaped than most academics)

- One bachelor thesis that was absolute horrible to do, we were basically unpaid labor. I wrote the thesis itself in 5 days, and was done with it.

- My first bachelor thesis, that was an absolute blessing. In hindsight: a perfect thesis experience. It took 3 months (as it should) and I got an amazing result (I analyzed 12 million tweets and hypothesized that 70% to 95% must be positive, I was right with 84.5%). The algorithm was simple but benchmarked very well against sophisticated ones. It was awesome.