Marc Andreessen has been posting some career advice. Here is a just a taste:

What should I study in college?

Some people argue that college will be your one chance in life to pursue your passion — to spend four years doing nothing but studying whatever you love the most, whether that’s Renaissance literature or existential philosophy.

I disagree.

If you intend to have an impact on the world, the faster you start developing concrete skills that will be useful in the real world, the better — and your undergrad degree is a great place to start. Once you get into the real world and you’re primed for success, then you can pursue your passion.

A typical liberal arts degree will be almost useless on its own. So you usually won’t have the option of immediately entering the workforce in a high-impact way when you graduate, and you’ll have to go get a useful graduate degree.

And even if you are already planning to get a useful graduate degree, you are much better off combining it with a substantive undergraduate degree — thereby becoming a “double threat.” More on this in a bit.

Which undergraduate degrees are useful in the real world?

Typically, those that have a technical element of some form — that teach you how to do something substantive.

Engineering degrees obviously qualify. The current myth that engineering and computer science degrees are less useful because all the jobs are going to India and China is silliness; ignore it.

Hard science degrees — physics, chemistry — also clearly qualify, as do mathematics and economics.

Why do I take this stance?

• Technical degrees teach you how to do something difficult and useful that matters in the real world. Even if you don’t end up actually doing what the degree teaches you how to do, going through the experience of learning how to do it will help you go through other serious learning experiences in your career. Complexity and difficulty will not faze you.
• Plus, technical degrees teach you how think like an engineer, a scientist, an economist, or a mathematician — how to use reason, logic, and data. This is incredibly useful in the real world, which generally demands rigorous thinking on the path to doing anything big.
• Plus, technical degrees indicate seriousness of purpose to future employers and partners. You get coded right up front as someone who is intent on doing real things.

Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don’t miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticized view of liberal arts broadening your horizons.

What graduate degrees are useful in the real world?

Generally, if you have a useful undergrad degree, I think graduate degrees are overrated. You can usually hit the workforce in a real job with just an undergraduate degree and progress rapidly according to your own ability and energy from there.

Of course, you’re hearing this from someone who could barely stand to stay in school long enough to finish undergrad, so take that for what it’s worth.

If you don’t have a useful undergrad degree, then a useful graduate degree is definitely a great idea. Business, math, economics, science — something practical, substantive.

Quite a few people in business have paired a liberal arts undergrad degree with an MBA. They seem to do just fine. But I think that’s a missed opportunity — much better would be an MBA on top of an engineering or math undergraduate degree. People with that combination are invaluable, and there aren’t nearly enough of them running around.

As far as PhDs are concerned — some of my best friends have PhDs. However, most of the people who have a huge impact on the world — outside of pure research and education — do not have PhDs. Draw from that whatever conclusion you think makes sense.

What college or university should I go to?

Try very very hard to go to one of the best colleges or universities in the world for your chosen field.

Don’t worry about being a small fish in a big pond — you want to always be in the best pond possible, because that’s how you will get exposed to the best people and the best opportunities in your field.

And here is how he winds up:

If you have lived an orchestrated existence, gone to great schools, participated in lots of extra curricular activities, had parents who really concentrated hard on developing you broadly and exposing you to lots of cultural experiences, and graduated from an elite university in the first 22 or more years of your life, you are in danger of entering the real world, being smacked hard across the face by reality, and never recovering.

What do I mean? It’s possible you got all the way through those first 22 or more years and are now entering the workforce without ever really challenging yourself. This sounds silly because you’ve been working hard your whole life, but working hard is not what I’m talking about. You’ve been continuously surrounded by a state of the art parental and educational support structure — a safety net — and you have yet to make tough decisions, by yourself, in the absence of good information, and to live with the consequences of screwing up.

In my opinion, it’s now critically important to get into the real world and really challenge yourself — expose yourself to risk — put yourself in situations where you will succeed or fail by your own decisions and actions, and where that success or failure will be highly visible.

By failure I don’t mean getting a B or even a C, but rather: having your boss yell at you in front of your peers for screwing up a project, launching a product and seeing it tank, being unable to meet a ship date, missing a critical piece of information in a financial report, or getting fired.

Why? If you’re going to be a high achiever, you’re going to be in lots of situations where you’re going to be quickly making decisions in the presence of incomplete or incorrect information, under intense time pressure, and often under intense political pressure. You’re going to screw up — frequently — and the screwups will have serious consequences, and you’ll feel incredibly stupid every time. It can’t faze you — you have to be able to just get right back up and keep on going.

That may be the most valuable skill you can ever learn. Make sure you start learning it early.