Education
Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or
self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often
considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more
respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas from which
people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the obvious computer
science and electrical engineering) physics, mathematics, linguistics, and
philosophy.