Parents, profs, friends, and fellow students just can’t stop pestering me about the Minerva adventure! Having been here for one solid month, I’ve condensed my experience in this post which talks about the classes, students, and the physical environment with some constructive criticism. If you have any questions, make yourself an account (takes less than 30 seconds) and comment here. Hopefully, this information is useful for some folks.
Table of contents
Academics
Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts (HCs)
My classes
Class structure
Mild pacing
Somewhat rigourous
Technical bugs
Students
examples of cool students
diverse culture
wholesome personality and humanities-lovers
Physical vibes
Chaotic dorm and not aspie-friendly
Messy and budget-constrained events
Minerva’s mission is to transform students into innovative problem solvers. The first-year classes are all about concepts, focusing on what we call HCs: “Habits of Mind and Foundational Concepts”. There are around 80 of them in four main categories: Creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and interacting effectively.
We have our own secret lingo with these HCs:
“That guy needs more #interpretivelens awareness” is the code for “They’re totally biased!”
You'll even hear folks randomly shout "#induction" while strolling down the street.
What are you learning in class?
We have four cornerstone courses for the first year: formal analyses, empirical analyses, multimodal communications, and complex systems. Plus, we have cornerstone civic projects, global learning meetings as well as coaching & talent development sessions, but let’s save those for another day.
Formal Analyses: In the last unit, we learned about basic principles in formal logic—for example, my assignment dealt with formalizing as well as analyzing inductive and deductive advertisements in San Francisco neighborhoods, which we’re staying for the 1st year.
Prof. Hadavand is highly skilled at communication: Every moment is quite thought-provoking and our classroom chat explodes like fireworks. This course evolves as fast as a tech startup. Professors call each other weekly and videos and documents are continuously added to the curriculum each year.
Units: Logical Thinking, Probability & Statistics (note that these units are for the fall semester only).
Empirical Analyses: It’s as if The Knowledge Society had a 3rd-year program. Here’s a class on finding relevant analogies to solve problems (we’ve analyzed world hunger and the California water crisis throughout multiple classes) and the required readings for class.
Units: Problem Solving, Scientific Method.
Multimodal Communications: I used to think “humanities had no right answers” but now it’s about making probabilistic interpretations based on authorial context. No more of the rambling student stereotype.
Units: How does language shape and represent reality, how might we imagine a perfect society, how might we navigate our place in society?
Complex Systems: My before and after comparison:
Before
This was my root cause analysis for the problem of “senior loneliness” from this spring. I kept getting feedback to focus on specific subproblems, yet as I researched into more subproblems, it seemed increasingly incomplete.
After
That’s because loneliness is an emergent property that involves feedback loops, a heavy emphasis in my CX class so far.
Here’s a new causal diagram we made dealing with immigration factors.
When analyzing another topic like loneliness, rather than targeting a specific subproblem, I could potentially look into how to break a feedback loop.
Each course follows established content and structures, as Minerva thinks it would make life easy for new faculty, however, professors said that there is still a steep learning curve, contributing to how 95% of faculty would stick for multiple years.
Units: Characteristics of Complex Systems, Complex People, Individuals in Society
Class structure
I've got two classes from 9 am to 12:30 pm, Monday through Thursday, each lasting 90 minutes.
We read assigned content (about 1-4 hours). Some students worry that no exams will lead to weak knowledge. Institutionally, there are two main solutions: One, students read Stephen Kosslyn’s paper on 16 learning principles and professors do prompt students to use principles in some classes. This paper offers more dense insights than those ASAP science videos. Ultimately it’s up to each student to build long-term memory.
Pacing
It’s subjective, really. My upbringing already had an emphasis on some of HCs so I’m supposed to get level 4s with a breeze—Basically, students can choose the depth of their learning and score 1 - 4 accordingly. But instead of level 4s, I get 4 hours of sleep on most days so I’m mediocre and find content just a bit challenging.
Friends confessed that they’re not learning much new except for FA. These aren’t complaints. Others are diving into Feynman lectures, Microeconomics courses, building startups, alternate history novels, and more.
Something that’s more objective is the amount of new info in each class depends on the prework effort of fellow students. Students don’t have infinite time, usually they spend 2 - 4 hours preparing for each class. You will get some repeated ideas in class and the easiest thing is to talk a lot without giving any concrete examples. The professor also controls the pacing. In general, I recall asking around 20 people about pacing and about 15 students were pretty happy with it.
Rigour
Rigour means logic at depths; while in high school I spent much time outside class to restructure information logically myself, I’m so happy that classes prompt me to think logically. However as mentioned, classes emphasize conceptual knowledge, so from my first month's perspective, the depth can be unsatisfying. e.g. What exactly does it mean for a complex system to be “unpredictable”? As mentioned, I just try to supplement it on my own time. A few upperclassmen say it gets more intense. Only formal analyses include coding. I heard that 50 out of the 200 passed the pre-summer programming assessment. But considering how most Minerva students end up studying a type of computational science, perhaps Minerva can consider including some programming aspects in 1st year complex systems class. Overall I’d say an 8/10 on rigour.
Bugs
Classes sometimes vanish from the calendar and mistakingly appear at 7 a.m. Students get trapped inside breakout rooms, and Minerva websites are labelled as “unsecured”. Minerva platforms are a bit glitchy, but it's not derailing our learning.
Students
Minerva is like a gifted neurodivergent school (hesitant to use the term “gifted” but for the lack of a better word).1 Students here are unconventional, just to randomly name a few: We got Michelia from Singapore who uses ADHD as her strength to create trending short videos; Arsenii, a Russian entrepreneur building prediction markets revolving around human potential; Sattik, an Indian student with validated astrophysics research inspired by 3blue1brown videos; Emma, who writes beautiful narrations in her novels and many more. Minervans, make yourself an account (takes less than 30 seconds) and comment your intro here.
Our first-year cohort size is around 200 hailing from 50 countries, with large groups from Kazakhstan and China. Professional fluency? Yes. Textbook struggles? Also yes. Communication here isn’t as concise and artistic compared to my Canadian high school but that’s just a quirk.
Personality-wise, we’re mostly NJ types (if you believe in MBTI). Students display high open-mindedness, moderate conscientiousness, and moderate to high agreeableness. I asked people how often they start projects early, on a scale of 1 - 5. A classmate said “square root of -25, a perfect 5 but imaginary” while others answered negative numbers. 99% of Minervans have a startup and are into philosophy plus another form of humanities. No STEM nerd jokes for me ☹️ which is so odd compared to my high school. Everyone’s humour here is very wholesome.
Minerva is not for everyone. 5 students left this year. Some found the conversations lacking depth and small talk exhausting. That seemed like a complaint against human society! Anyway. This might be the case if one is looking for more technical conversations in a specific discipline. Minervans aren’t the most knowledgeable in a specific discipline, but they can be interesting because of conceptual knowledge fusing together. You can find at least one person to have deep conversations with.
This transitions nicely into the often complained-about physical environment.
Physical vibes
My overall observation is that Minerva has solid intentions of training students to become innovative problem solvers but clearly faces some execution challenges like coordination issues, technical glitches, and budget constraints.
Student dorms
Minerva has no physical campus except for the dorm. When I moved into one of our two student res halls, it was a bit of a mess. Carpets and tables were still in transit and it felt like insufficient planning. Imagine 100 students, 8 stoves, and a handful of coin-operated washing machines.
Unlike the strict rules and noise patrols in Chinese dorms, the staff here are quite uncaring of our needs for quiet hours (From 11 pm to 7 am on weekdays, and 12 am to 8 am otherwise).
As an aspie sensitive to sound, it’s like sleeping in a flea market 🏟️ A bunch of my friends face the same problem. In their own words:
“Lol now we don't even have the right to sleep peacefully”
“I use 4 different types of earplugs”
“I’d like to be an early bird and sleep at 9pm, but people are loud”
“Guys is it okay whoever is singing in the kitchen to lower the voice, it’s midnight and it’s really loud”
If you’re informing staff about noise like I did, know that they don’t necessarily have a problem-solving mindset: You will hear them talking about how impossible it is and get a free lecture on the etymology of “quiet”.
So far, we relied on maintaining good relationships with our neighbours and numerous earplugs. Most students also agree that the living condition in San Francisco is “meh” due to budget constraints.
My feedback for staff: We’re not looking to pick a fight! Just like how our cultures vary, so do our student needs. Adopt a problem-solving mindset. Conducting some checks during the quiet hours can be helpful.
Events
I have friends who turn into hermits. Minerva does organize mandatory in-person events and optional event experiences which are highly competitive in sign-ups. So it’s up to the students to explore the city in groups. Tip: Make a group chat for your events and suggest some clear action items or people’ll wait passively and forget about it.
While most students show up on time to Minerva events, it still takes a half hour for things to get rolling due to technical difficulties and very slow check-ins. Some staff try their best with the “shhhhh Minervans” plea, but it isn’t working much while others are more trained at hushing the crowd with clapping. I’m not sure if the staff is aware of this coordination problem. One idea is calling more students in the work-study program to help with the check-ins and keep events flowing.
An event that I enjoyed but could be better: During the first week, we were looking forward to a feast:
200 of us waited for an hour, getting hungrier and more curious about the food. We were finally told to peel a tangerine and smell the diffusing fragrances over 5 minutes. Then we ate Ethiopian street food with our hands while reflecting on general existential questions. Minerva insists this is a feature, not a bug, in thinking intentionally. given the budget constraints, I suggest looking for more affordable events that take the focus off of material resources and avoid setting big expectations. Secondly, self-reflection questions should be more creative to spark discussion.
Imagine if you’re at a roundtable with the question:
Inspired by Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, how would you live your life if you had to reexperience it infinitely?
Variation: If you had to infinitely attend Minerva University, what would you do?
We could get some questions inspired by philosophers, artists, and novelists in there and crowdsource questions from fellow students.
In general, I’m curious about how my beliefs regarding Minerva’s academics, student body, and physical environment will update in the coming years. This post is my honest experience and is not officially affiliated with Minerva University. If you have any questions I’ll be taking them in the comments. If you feel this is informative, leave a like and share it with anyone who might find it useful.
“Gifted” as in many went to gifted schools in their countries, and we all passed Minerva’s IQ test of sorts. I avoid this word due to the implied fixed mindset and superiority, which I don’t believe in, but also I can’t find another term 😂 “Neurodivergent”: I know dozens of students with diagnosed (and possibly undiagnosed) ADHD and I myself am an aspie. Broadly, it means having brain function that doesn’t represent the middle 68% of the human population. I’ll be interested in what is this in relation to and other things about the definition.
How much do you think you are actually learning compared to the counterfactual of going to a traditional college? Does everyone benefit from the HCs, or do some people already know about them?
Good work!