@blossom All very good points and insight. I never thought I would be the next Steve Jobs, but I do believe in my potential to achieve a lot once I’ve figured all this out. I guess I left out an important piece, and to add in @momofthreeboys I did transfer out of Physics to a tech school for 1 year after my Junior year. I pursued a degree in Industrial Design. Credits lined up, and I thought it’d be more fitting after my success in the internship to be able to improve my ability to design products. That was actually where I broke down and developed noticeable depression. The classes were very hands-on and team-oriented. In teams I would engage with everyone, but often was ignored, so I instead worked on my own to further developed my solution. Then the group would hit a wall that I formerly warned of in the beginning, and eventually come back to my idea. Group projects have always been other people presenting my work. I’m not saying that to be cocky, it’s just how things went. I don’t really enjoy praise as much as I like solving problems. The technical classes were even more basic than before, making it even harder to go to class. Unfortunately the smaller school meant smaller classes, and my teachers were much more aware of me skipping. Two profs didn’t even let me take exams, and the whole class framed me as a slacker. I soon developed extreme social anxiety about the whole thing. I just wanted to escape at that point.
@blossom Which universities come to mind that are more intellectually demanding? I know I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I believe that I would feel more inclined to push myself if I was in a more challenging environment. The idea of “just finish school because” has never helped me in the past, and certainly won’t in the future. I actually like people around me to be smarter than I am so I feel inclined to improve myself. I really lack the drive otherwise, which is sad, but that’s where I’m at.
My kid went to MIT and on day 1 realized that he was a dwarf among giants. You can be the smartest math kid your HS has produced in a decade and then get to college and quickly dump the illusion that you’re going to be able to survive four years without going to every single class, review session, lab, etc. You miss one problem set and you know you’re on your way out.
This is not an anomaly. You could be at CMU or RPI or JHU or U Michigan or UIUC or another couple of dozen universities studying engineering OR Physics OR Industrial Design and be surrounded by people whose awesomeness pushes you to keep up every day.
But this is more magical thinking on your part. Don’t delay finishing your degree in order to get to one of these places. That’s going to derail you and waste the next five years. You can do a Master’s degree; you can get a job working for a university and then take courses (for free) as a non-credit student; you can get hired by a startup formed by a group of young grads of one of these places.
But with a college degree. So go do that.
Re: out of the box thinking… would you drive over a bridge that was designed by a group of engineers who decided to “wing it” instead of relying on the principles of safety design that are the gold standards of the industry? Would you fly in a plane being piloted by someone who wants to “creatively” figure out how to land, instead of listening to the commands from air traffic control? Do you want your grandma getting chemo from a doctor who ignores a decades worth of clinical practice and decides to “derive it on my own, which is much more important than getting the right answer?”. No. There IS a right answer some time. It could change (lots of people no longer get radiation because advances in cellular research can help doctors decide who needs it and who doesn’t) but at any given point in time, there is usually Best Practice in any field.
Once you accept this reality-- nobody is torturing you by making you come up with the right answer, but that’s how progress moves ahead- you will be able to get to a point professionally where you can freelance/be creative/do it your way. But nobody is driving a car you’ve designed if you haven’t mastered the basics of mechanical design.
You dropped out in your senior year? You got A’s on tests but never did work or even went to lectures? Now you are in a classic dead end job. This sounds like a spoof post.
Assuming it’s real though, why not just go back and get your degree? It wouldn’t take long.
I started writing this trying to be diplomatic but gave up. I want to reach through the computer and shake you.
I know three kids, wait, no, four, in their early 20s in my immediate circle who are working dead-end retail jobs - actually, two aren’t working at all. All four had the chance at college, paid for by their parents, and all four quit, like you. First world problems, really. I work in an industry where I’m reminded daily of real anguish and hardship, and to see kids so casually throw away million-dollar chances like this – and when you look at lifetime earnings, it is literally a million-dollar chance – makes me clench my jaw and grind my teeth.
If I read one of your last posts right, you not only dropped out of your physics program at a traditional college, you then dropped out of tech school?
How old are you? Is working a dead-end job while “trying to” teach yourself programming languages working out better for you? I assume in your class of one, your “real challenges and high intellectual expectations” are being met?
Like the kids of my acquaintance, you are going to wake up soon and realize you’re 30 and still working a dead-end job with no possibility of breaking out. Here’s your future: getting married, having kids, working like a dog to cover the bills, having zero time, energy or money to exercise your massive brain power, and then dying, having wasted all that potential.
Stop obsessing about yourself and your superior intellect, find a school that will still have you and get your degree. If you can handle the workload.
Your thread name, and your last post, both pin the blame and the hope on the school. “Disappointed with School” and “Which universities come to mind that are more intellectually demanding?” - but the issue is not the school.
Even if a perfect fit school could be identified, an intellectually demanding institution full of smart students, your academic record would preclude you from admission. And if perchance it didn’t, that institution would require you to attend classes, even if you didn’t feel like it. It would require you to work with others. It would require you do some “busy work” you would find a waste of time.
Every job I’ve ever had required boring, mundane tasks that are beneath me. My brilliant idea for resolving an issue has been ignored and I’ve been instructed to implement my supervisor’s idea instead. I’ve been required to work together with my colleagues. I don’t have the option to just spend my time doing the stuff I’m brilliant at.
Not having a degree will automatically shut doors. Finishing your degree will open some of them.
Here’s the thing…you might be really smart and have some fantastic ideas. But your obvious narcissism is preventing you from achieving anything. Whether you are smart or not, you have to go to classes like everyone else, do the work like everyone else and stick with it like everyone else. Sorry to disappoint you, but no one is going to hand you a degree and a fulfilling job just because you claim you’re smarter than everyone else in the room.
“I know I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I believe that I would feel more inclined to push myself if I was in a more challenging environment.”
Whether this is a real post or not, it’s a real problem. I hear this from my own students regularly. This was me 25 years ago.
These students are often right that they would be more inspired if they had to run to keep up with their peers. But you have to earn your place among those peers. That means mastering the material AND cooperating with the instructor’s requirements. If you don’t do that, then you don’t get a place in those communities. You have to make your choices in light of that reality.
Funny about the dynamics class, my son is now also complaining he’s not allowed to use calculus in his physics class, but he goes by the rules, they’ll use calculus next year. He’s a HS junior, by the way.
Using less advanced tools does have its merit, it helps you to view the problem from different angles and often in greater depth. There are things you can learn from many situations you’d normally avoid. For example, learning to work in a team with people who may not be as smart as you are is an invaluable practical skill. The smarter you are, the more you need it. Unless you’re a genius and plan to be a crazy eccentric scientist type I guess, then you might get away with limited people skills. You can learn many valuable skills from people who are not that great in academic subjects. Maturity implies a healthy degree of humility.
If you want to be around smarter people, you have to actively seek them out. If you’re learning programming languages, you can go to programming meetups, or meetups on whatever topic interest you. If you enroll in college again, you’ll have a better access to professors, not necessarily those who teach your classes.
Every job has its share of photocopying. No matter what work you do, it will always have one or two essential tasks that are tedious. It sounds like the homework was that for you. But no matter what work you do, you will have some tasks that are just mind-numbing. You need to figure out how to live with that and to be gracious to people who think differently from you, even if you know they aren’t at your level.
And it’s also true that you may have been at a school that was a poor fit. If you had been at a school like MIT or Olin, I doubt you would have been as frustrated. You would have found peers and interesting problems to solve, but you would still have had to do homework that you found dull.
I agree with the others who suggested finding a therapist, but since you are so close to finishing your degree, is it possible for you to just suck it up and do it, even as you are working with a counselor to sort out your other issues? It’s a shame to be so close to a degree and not finish.
Wow, post #5! I tend to be blunt, but yikes!
OP - look. Your parents paid a ton of dough. For all intents and purposes, you took their money and flushed it down the toilet - vis a vis, they paid for a product, a college degree, for their child, and now there is nothing to show for it. Yeah, that is disrespectful but also it is your life not theirs (but I’ll assume it was their money).
So, here are your options:
- Acknowledge this and move on. They spent a lot of money and time and trouble on you going to college, but it wasn’t for you, and that’s that.
- Look into going back to school and finishing up. Call them on the phone, see what requirements you need. It’s possible there was a change in your department since you left.
What I recommend is a third option:
Aggressively look for colleges to transfer to. You want to do mechanical engineering? Then find a MechE program to transfer to. See how many of your credits will transfer - yeah, I can tell you it ain’t 100%, but it ain’t 0% either. Find a few options, check out FA, time to graduate, and how many credits they will accept from the other college.
There are unique colleges out there, and yes, we know that many people do well without a college degree, but if you do want to be an engineer, a degree is almost necessary.
Of course, you can go with option 1, but it sounds to me you aren’t happy with your dead-end job, and you weren’t happy with physics. Would you be happy just looking into whether you would want to go somewhere else? Would you want to move away somewhere, to immerse yourself in a new environment as an encouragement?
I always said that if I didn’t get into any Ivies, I’d just got to the University of Hawai’i. That way, at least I could go to the beach and be distracted from not getting into my dream school.
As for autism spectrum or not - do we give a pass to bad behavior (like my S18 if you see my other posts) because someone has a diagnosis but NOT if we don’t have a diagnosis? I think if psychology advances in the last fifty years have told us anything, it’s that many of us have mental health issues that keep us more or less “in the swim” and also that even if you have a diagnosis, it’s not necessarily the answer.
I also saw OP’s post about working on cars - how about votech for auto repair? How about an apprenticeship?
Maybe the real first step is to find a dead-end job you like.
Reminded me of a problem I faced way back when… I was a senior in highschool and was tutoring a 5th grader for extra money. There was a problem that took me 2 minutes to solve by “two-variable linear equations” approach (back in my country at the time, this was taught at the beginning of 7th grade). I and two other guys ended up spending more than 1 hour to come up with a way to solve it using 5th grade math.
@blossom -
That’s what I’ve been telling him and his mom. But besides being restless, he’s also too lazy to “pay his dues.”
I was one of those who at times found college “too easy.” But I realized that I needed to get a degree and thus I took more classes than an average student would and graduated (with honors) in 2.5 years, while working to support myself. I was just too busy to get bored.
Many kids who drop out do so because they run into a mental health challenge that hit them at age 20 or 21. Or because they can’t figure out what they want to do. Some get into trouble with drugs or alcohol and get derailed that way. The majority of kids that start college don’t finish (although most CC kids do).
But its not just kids. I know adults who not only got undergraduate degress they got law, dental, social work or MBA degrees and are not in their field. Some dropped out of the workforce all together (some became stay at home moms or other careers).
OP if you are depressed, or had an episode of depression, you really need to figure that out before you go back to school. You need to take charge of your life and get back on track, with help from your family if possible.
@rhandco I think I know what you mean in your first point (and agree with that ) but I’m going to respectfully nit-pick the wording a little. I don’t think MotleyFool’s parents bought a product (college degree); they bought a process or opportunity. I only say this because my professor husband has had multiple experiences that boil down to this scenario:
student: Why did you give me a “D” for the semester?
DH: What grade do you think you deserve?
student: well, you know I need an “A”… I’m planning to go to med school. And my parents pay tuition, yadda yadda…
Not saying MotleyFool’s thinking falls exactly in this camp (I don’t think it does) but I do think it’s a too-prevalent view.
Agreed.
- It seems more socially acceptable to not get the degree, or not use the degree if one is a stay-at-home parent. I know loads of people in that boat.
^^and some people are stay-at-home parents because they really, really want to be stay-at-home parents, because they are good at it, and because they can. But I digress…
OK, thanks, @Midwest67. No problem. Guess I’m having a “sensitive” day after too little sleep and a couple of other things…
Answering your question, I’ve taken many classes at several colleges. I found a large variation in level of difficulty, as well as teaching style and grading requirements. The most challenging tended to be honors type classes at colleges that have many stellar students, such as the physics 60 series at Stanford. However, there were many exceptions. Occasionally a professor in a less advanced class would set the class level at what he thought was appropriate, which was well beyond capabilities of the vast majority of the class, giving exams where the mean grade was as low as 30%. You mentioned that you were graded on participation, which I’ve found to be rare in tech classes. The grading on participation combined with your experiences makes me think you attended classes where the professor set the class more on a high school level, which includes some hand holding and what you call “aids”, much like you’d find in typical high school classes.
This is somewhat of a moot discussion because while your perfect match classes/college may exist somewhere, you are going have more limited options to choose from, given your transcript. If a degree is likely to give you more opportunities to help get out of the “dead-end job”, then I’d suggest looking in to what options you do have to complete your degree and making it work. You mentioned having depression in another post. Untreated depression can sap your energy and make it difficult to follow through on almost anything. If mental health issues are going to hinder your college performance, then it would be a good idea to get them treated before taking more graded classes. Online classes may also work well, particularly ones that allow you to go at your own pace.
It’s a tough spot. There can be an intersection between what is being recommended by the medical experts (withdraw from school due to mental health concerns) and the VERY REAL need in this world to have a four year college degree, no matter how smart one may be.
I’d suggest going to the nearest local state university with all credits in hand and with with a counselor to figure out the shortest pathway to a BA, regardless of the major. We live in a world where a four year degree is absolutely necessary, whether or not you use the degree and whether or not you enjoy the process. It is too late now to go back in time and start fresh at some school does not require all the busy work. It is NOT necessary to pursue this degree at this local university fulltime, however. You may be closer than you think to a BA - then take your time but set a time goal and try hard to stick to it. It could be tough and you may miss your goal once or twice, but it is a worthwhile goal. And I don’t mean you must start graded work right away. I just think that meeting with someone at a local university to figure out where you stand might be encouraging to you and help you plot out your future.
I tell my kids that a college degree is, first and foremost, a ticket to choices. If you want some semblance of control over your future, you will need the 4 year degree. It’s not enough to say, well, not everybody is suited to college. That is certainly true but it doesn’t matter. And you are close, it seems.
I also tell my kids that college is all about learning the rules of the game and then following them. This is a fundamental life skill. If you struggle with this, well, then you will need to overcome it and honestly, seeing a therapist regularly is a good first step.
Most important, don’t take all this personally. Don’t beat yourself up about it. There are SO many young adults in your shoes, or some variation of your situation. Life is not linear. Just keep moving forward. You’ve got lots to offer. You just need to get over a rough patch and figure out a path forward.