This is just a summary of the speech “Can you get an MIT education for $2,000?” made by Scott young. I learned about Scott Young and his story from my friend 3 days ago. And I am so amazing that one person can finish 33 course of computer science of MIT in 12 months instead of 4 years. So I decided to learn about his story. Then I find his speech on TEDx. I watched it for several times and I write down this summary.

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1 Motivation

Many students are complain about government’s cut-down strategies of there subsidy of the tuition. But if one person can learn whole course of a degree by spending 12 months instead of 4 years and 1/100 cost of the tuition, he will not complain it again. So when we hope some changes of government or school, why not make some changes on ourselves. I learn the MIT courses just for the curiosity. I just want education but not school. There are so many online free courses of famous university or college. So I have chance to learn about the MIT courses, and when I chose some online courses of the computer science, I just thought about “why not learn the whole degree?” And the cost is just few textbook which price under $2,000. I mean, I can get the computer science degree while I get my business degree. That’s fantastic!

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2 Challenges

The real challenges I faced is to learn the course. The MIT courses are so difficult to learn and understand even you are a bright student. I make a curriculum of these courses. And I found that every 10 days I should pass an exam, at the same time, I have to finish the program projecting. (That’s gonna be crazy if I was Scott Young.╮(╯▽╰)╭).

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3 Get through it

When I enter the house where the professor was facing 300 audience, it’s up to me to raise my hand to ask the questions. This is just an different approach of learning. And I found I could learn faster by this unconventional approach than the formal approach in most of universities.

The second point is time work. Try to regular our time accurately. Many students spend time not on study, but on communicating with classmates, puttering around the house or even sleep in the classroom. That’s not an effective way of using time.

The assignments also can help us. For example, here is a struggling questions, and I want to solve it or I don’t understand why the answer is that. I will thinkabout it once, twice or for several times. Thus I get a feedback between the questions and the solutions. That’s critical to learn.

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4 Make some changes on ourselves

Maybe you don’t want to learn MIT courses just for fun. But even if you insist on learning in old ways, it still impacts on you. Being able to teach yourself of complex skill and big ideas is going to essential to stay ahead. Like it or not, most education in the future is self-education. And I believe the future of self-learning.