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A comment on What Bill Gates was doing at 20 years old. Parent comment

Re:What Bill Gates was doing at 20 years old by davidwihl on Wednesday April 18, 2018 @06:53AM (#16866240)
Harvard, unlike some other Ivies such as Columbia, let's you take time off your degree without penalty to explore ventures and other ideas. So the ones who don't succeed may have simply returned to Harvard to complete their degrees. It is a multiclass, not binary, classification problem.
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Re:What Bill Gates was doing at 20 years old by Moodles on Wednesday April 18, 2018 @09:11AM (#16867059)
Makes sense. I am, and I'm sure many other people are too, guilty of modifying how risky and brave a story is afterwards. E.g. "I turned down these job offers to risk it all for this one venture" when in reality the other job offers would have waited a few weeks while you build options. I suspect telling yourself these kinds of stories probably helps boost your own confidence too.
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Re:What Bill Gates was doing at 20 years old by borplk on Wednesday April 18, 2018 @08:30AM (#16866797)
Exactly. It's risk free.

If you become successful people will use it as bragging rights. Otherwise you go back and finish the degree and no one hears about it.

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