The Road Not Taken

[fsc_old]

I was introduced to that piece by Robert Frost back in 9th grade, and I had no clue what it meant at the time. Today, I'm considering taking the road less traveled by.

I'm a computer science major with a year left in college who has become emotionally detached from academia. I'm considering taking off preferably a year or more from school to:
- Build my resume by coding personal projects and self-learning more programming languages & concepts
- Work to support myself. Preferably a CS internship/part-time/full-time gig, and hopefully some of my personal projects will be profitable.
- Train and compete in some amateur boxing matches. Coding, boxing, and pickup are my passions, and I had to leave my school team thanks to schoolwork =[
- Improve my social & seduction skills, of course

Hopefully somewhere along the way I'll miss school and return to it. I want a degree for sure.

Reasons other than emotional detachment and lack of motivation that led me to consider taking time off:
- The upcoming spring quarter is the last quarter I'm eligible for the state grant, which paid for most of my tuition and other expenses. Next year, I'm only eligible for $5,500 in federal grants and $12,500 in federal loans; I still need $12,000-$14,000 more to finish off academic expenses, rent, and other costs of living.
- My GPA is too shitty for scholarships and grants.
- I don't receive financial support from my family. I can ask my aunt and uncle in the worst-case scenario, but I'd really rather not do that. They're already burdened with supporting my grandma and my alcoholic father.
- My financial options for next year are loans and/or work. I may need my uncle or aunt to cosign the loan, but I feel uncomfortable asking them. I'll end up with a total debt of about $34,000 upon graduation (I currently owe Uncle Sam $8,000). If I work during the school year, I'll have less time for schoolwork, resume building, interview prep, and social life.
- Fall quarter's career fair is where most students land internship and full-time offers. If I were to continue with school, I'll only have the summer to work on personal projects and prepare for interviews to make up for my shitty GPA.
- Seduction reasons, and I want to have stories to share with my kids in the future. I want to be one hell of a role model and inspire them because I never had one growing up.

My current plan:
1. Spend some time wrapping up my current, unfinished personal projects to improve my resume and prepare a little for interviews
2. Apply for a shitload of CS-related gigs and anything technical, in any state while continuing to improve myself
3. Take the first offer that's decently-balanced in pay and relevance to CS
4. Tend to my passions, continue improving my resume and look for better employment opportunities in other states
5. Return to school, finish degree, get a full-time job somewhere awesome

My fellow seducers, please share with me any advice, wisdom, information, and anything else that you may have.

Thank you

 

[PinotNoir]

That could work, and I know you can do it.

However, it's strange because I was in a very similar position, with the exception being that I had money for school (my parents started a savings account for me when I was born to pay for college). I was also a CS major and have currently had a programming job for the past 3 years.

Freshman - As
Sophomore - Bs
Junior - Cs
Senior - Cs and Ds

Did I become dumber? Was the workload harder?

No, not really. Sure, the workload was harder, but I had less "dead weight" classes, so it balanced itself out with more time.

What happened is that I became extremely disinterested in society's idea of academia. Since 5 years of age, we are in school with only summer breaks. Even with my transition from high school to college, I only had a summer break. It's awful and disheartening, like a prison. On top of that, year-after-year, I'd just see the typical process that made me sick: be a sponge and soak up all information; on test day, squeeze out all of the information; and then get a nice A and a pat on the back from the teacher. No one truly "learns" anymore; they're all just sponges wanting a magic letter or number. They don't try and think of new things based off of the information they know or dive deeper. I really thought about dropping out after my Junior year and pursuing a different career, but with 1 year left and after talking with my parents, I decided to finish. If you don't finish when young, you're less likely to ever finish, and if you wait too long, you lose your credits (they expire), so you'd have to start as a freshman again.

For senior year, I decided not to be a sponge. During my lessons or readings for homework, if I found something that interested me, I ended up going to the library and spending more time researching that particular thing and making tons of my own side projects around it. I pretty much just ignored anything that I deemed as extraneous or just memorization for the purpose of memorization. I actually thought about the concepts I enjoyed and tried to improve them or combine them with other concepts to produce a unique solution. My grades were awful, but luckily, you don't have to put your GPA on your résumé/CV (or leave it blank on an application), and I have never been asked what my GPA was during an interview (and if they do, better not to work there anyway). I got a job very quickly and easily after college.

Since you're wanting to pursue the same career as your major and because you only have one year left, I'd suggest sticking it out, if possible. I think that would be the wiser decision. But, if you really can't afford another year, then your path will be fine. I've also known people to get full careers as juniors and then had their employer pay for their senior year, but, then you have to commit to a 2-4 year contract that you will definitely stay with them and work there, so I don't suggest it.

 

[Ross]

As long as you're working towards things, sure. I'm not too sure of the advice I could give you in regards to the value of a C.S. degree, but then you've really got to analyze why you borrowed all that money in the first place if you weren't too convinced about getting something that you now see as worthless. It's almost as if you're telling those who are investing in you, "Yeah, I'll take your money, but I won't try very hard to use it to achieve the intended purpose."

Too often I see my peers tell themselves that school is a waste of time and that they can accomplish more without it. But all their activities outside of school include hanging out with friends, getting drunk, smoking, etc. They're not working towards any goals, and whenever they think about doing something about it they go on to blame school for not giving them enough time. I would fully recommend that you ask yourself a few questions,

- Are you working towards seduction/getting money/boxing/everything you say you'll be doing when you get the time off of school during your current free time? Or are you doing other things?
- Is there anyway to save time on schoolwork? Or is it legitimately taking up 12 hours of every single day for you to just manage to get by on a 'shitty GPA'?

In all honesty, it sounds like a case of victim mentality. You feel like the school system has screwed you over, so you blame all your lack of motivation on them. I'm not defending nor supporting schools; you're the one who decided to seek them out to gain something from them, and it sounds like you were in for a shock when you realized that college is more of the same as high school was; you're going to have to do repetitive work and play the system. Does school hold you back? Hell no. You can easily learn as much as you want in school and outside of school, hell, you don't even need schools to get jobs as long as you have experience with things and know how to do what you need to do to get paid. Do you think I learned seduction from going to a class in school? Nope; I spent my free time working on it.