18 years old I had to be at work at 545am in the military to learn how to become an air traffic controller. I completed my training in 50% of the allotted time, becoming a fully certified air traffic controller in a fairly complex airspace - White Sand Missile Range, NM when F-117s were still in service. Maybe college students just need to have better self-accountability and learn responsibility.
Maybe college students just need to have better self-accountability and learn responsibility.
My ex husband was career military and used to say the same thing about our homeschooled sons -- that they needed to develop a routine and learn to just get up in the morning because someday a job would require this of them. Meanwhile, Mr. Hypocrite To The Max never stopped being a night owl himself and would stay awake on weekends until 2 a.m. or whatever and go to work on Monday morning on 2 or 3 hours of sleep, then nap when he got home after work because he was short of sleep. Twenty plus years of military service never really cured him of being a night owl.
It always amazes me how talented people are at ignoring actual reality for some convenient theory of theirs.
Right!? I mean, you have 18 year olds in 2 very different environments of the military and college. Like, in the military you have to also do incredibly complicated things under a lot of stress and it takes a lot of mental fortitude and training, and then you don't even know when that training will be tested unlike with a final exam. Passing classes is much simpler than landing a blackhawk into a firefight or the logistics of supplying a battleship, things 20 years olds do in the services. Yet the bar for entering college is generally much higher than for the military but the stress, responsibility, and workload of the average warfighter is much higher than for the average college student. I just don't get the real moaning and groaning and trying to make things trivially easy for the students (we all complain from time to time to get things off our chests, I get that though)
> I just don't get the real moaning and groaning and trying to make things trivially easy for the students
If colleges treated students with military expectations, they'd stop getting as many applications. The school would paradoxically become less completive over time.
It's why colleges are putting in luxury student dorms and spending millions on activity budgets. The pampering of the American college student is a direct result of universities turning into degree businesses, instead of the halls of mutual development they used to be. Growth and development require sacrifice, paying for a slightly higher number on a transcript does not.
It is not, because to completely failed out of training there have to documented examples of why that individual can't perform the job. We make every accommodation to see if they can perform. However, the job requires you being able to work at any hour, thus they aren't able to perform the duties of the job.
It sounds like you're arguing for the title here. You say the job requires you to work at any hour, among other things. You say the lessons are at 6 in the morning. You say 80% fail. Sure, it doesn't conclusively prove that people drop out because of those two things, but it seems likely.
"However, the job requires you being able to work at any hour, thus they aren't able to perform the duties of the job."
That is why it is survivorship bias. You are assuming that it is possible for everyone because you and your coworkers were able to do it, while ignoring the fact that many people flunked out because they couldn't do it. That is what survivorship bias is.
Survivorship bias is when the people who survive don't understand why other people failed. We understand why they failed and the most common reason is that most people aren't comfortable making quick decisions where people's lives are at stack. Time of day usually isn't a factor here, but people's confidence in themselves to trust their training and decisions. The other reason is people just can't handle the shear amount of knowledge (rules) required to perform the job. Such as not everyone can become a surgeon due to the education, skill-set and intelligence required not every person can due air traffic control.
As you said earlier, some people drop out because they can't work at all hours. You don't know why, but you are assuming that it is because they don't work as hard as you . Hence survivorship bias. People who drop out for reasons other than not being able to work effectively at all hours are irrelevant.
The only way you can 'drop-out' per-se is if you diagnose yourself with 'fear of controlling'. Meaning the job scares you, outside of that you cannot just quit.
Things are never so simple and clear cut -- delayed sleep phase disorder is a fairly common ailment. There was a recent paper which studied a mutation that might explain some cases of DSPD [1]. According to [1], a sizeable fraction of the population possesses a mutation such that their circadian clock runs ~2 hours slower (their day is longer) and so have a sleeping pattern which drifts. This usually manifests itself as late sleep/late starts.
Do you want someone controlling your plane who can't handle waking up early? Air traffic control is 24 hours a day 7 days week; you will be working at all hours of the day.
>Do you want someone controlling your plane who can't handle waking up early?
I would rather have someone who has no problem staying up late rather than someone who is a 'morning person'. Once awake, night owls seems to be better at staying awake.
Around the time I turned fourteen I lost my ability to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning. I hung on to decent grades by "testing well," but never able to keep my head up during morning classes. All along people told me it was a discipline problem, and I followed their goddamned advice and got nowhere.
The last fifteen years of research in sleep and brain chemistry have validated my experience. It had nothing to do with self-accountability and responsibility; some people are night owls, others are not.
Fuck you for thinking that your personal experiences are indicative of me having “poor character.” Fuck you and your fucking career.
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News no matter how wrong another person is.
We all know how activating it can be when someone treads callously into a painful area. But you need to let that surge pass before replying. Failing that, re-read your comment and edit out any uncivil bits after you post. In this case, deleting the first and last paragraphs would have made for a fine comment and a more effective rebuttal.
I mean dude, he's not talking to people with medical issues. I don't think anyone would besmirch you due to a medical condition. I think he's talking about people without sleeping conditions, just Gaussian distributed recruits that want to get in. The services will ask and test you on these clear issues like people that can't drink a gallon of water in under a minute or folks blind in one eye. Also, being a night owl is not a medical condition, what your brief comment describes is obviously a medical condition that would disqualify your from the services. You life is not in anyway easy because of it, as far as I can tell from this comment. It's not a big deal. However, if what the researchers say is true about the widespread 'night owl' prevalence in the population, then it is obviously not something that can't be corrected with a very loud and buff drill sergeant, as many many cohorts of incoming boot camps across the world for centuries have shown.
I went through basic training in open-floor barracks with a few folk who insisted they were 'night owls' and would play their music to 01:00 or later, falling asleep to the noise.
Initially the rest of us endured it and would turn-off the radio when they fell asleep, to then enjoy four hours sleep. After the second week, however, we managed to 'cure' the night owls.
I am sure many people suffer a medical condition that impairs sleeping. Most, however, do not.
Maybe you should think about it less as "coddling" and more as "people are different and stuffing them into the same box is runs the very real risk of failure or unhappiness." But that doesn't validate your own life choices the way your posts do, so I can understand why you might not.
The idea that "everyday life" should demand that everyone operate in cognitively subpar conditions for them because you like them is a silly one. The last time I woke up before 9AM when I didn't have a flight to catch the next morning was 2013; I will have been successfully running my own consultancy (and making half again as much money with about half the work that the "everyday life" equation specified) for three years now at the end of this month.
Weird how that life works and works well without sneering at people who do like to get up and work early.
You sound like every single martial artist that I've ever met, and almost every single one of them has - just like you - an overblown sense of how tough and knowledgeable they are, and how everyone around them is a pathetic worm who just needs to harden up and get to work.
Funny thing is getting up early to go to the gym or do some course work isn't tough, almost everybody who goes to college does that. Long days? College. (17 hour days for weeks on end through every semester for me.) You get weekends, college students don't. You get paid for your hours, college students need to work a job outside of their full time (40+ hour) studies.
At least in New Zealand, universities structure their courses so that only the top percentage of the population can get through the stress and workload - something like an 80-90% dropout rate by the end of the bachelor's degree. (Weren't you bragging about an 80% dropout rate in your course?)
What is tough is successfully completing something that medical professionals tell you that you very likely can't do, whether it's a college degree in an "inappropriate" field or learning to walk again.
Put this another way, if you know you can do something, is completion of it worthy of note?
Yeah, gatekeeping and all that jazz, I agree there, but I'm going to go ahead and say that the average US college freshman student probably does not have it as 'tough' as the average US boot-camp inductee. I would extend that to the integral of 'toughness' over the tenure of the average US college 4th year student versus the average 4th year US service member, but it's more of a crap-shot with the Air Force ;).
The average 4th year US service member will probably have put up with massively more crap than the average college graduate. Which makes them tough in a specific way. That seems plausible enough :)
What I was objecting to
A) "Life is tough/ college isn't".
Put in those terms, "Life is tough, X isn't" works for basically anything. And, I would argue, military service is closer to college (specific schedules, insulated from real world, the amount of time spent on PS/XBOX) than real life.
B) the tone that seems to indicate that the military has a monopoly in all types of toughness.
