Hey Folks, I’ve been in college for six years now and have dropped classes left and right. I had been consistent in the beginning and, of course, Covid had caused a bit of problems with consistency. Since that time, my grades slipped. I’ve dropped classes as well. I should have graduated two years ago however i’ve been working to survive since. I’ve got roughly 40k in student loan debt. each time I try and take classes again, I manage to for about two weeks and then after i have some random event in life come in and just ruin my motivation. (death, sickness, major change in lifestyle, etc.). I’ve been working in a career that was based upon my major and it is a decently comfortable and consistent job (IT), with some stress just due to the human interaction, however I do have issues with debt (working well to get out of but won’t be completely out of non-student loan debt until 2025). I’d consider going back in about six or seven years depending on how life treats me, but is it worth cutting my losses, start paying back student loans, and focus on my job? If I do manage to take classes, i’ll have about two years worth of classes to bust through but I’m not sure if I can push that much effort back out.
But I stumbled upon those, I didn’t plan on acquiring them.
That’s why college kids don’t plan on what to make of their lives after college. They’re kids! If they knew, they wouldn’t need to be there. It took me a degree and a half, a number of failed creative projects and taking a job out of necessity to end up back in a completely different, adjacent career, eventually in multiple different countries. I could have predicted none of that when I started my first degree. For one, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, that was the entire point of university. For another, I didn’t know half of the options I ended up taking even existed or were available to me. Many weren’t, in fact, until a particular set of circumstances lined up.
But I’m sure glad that in the meantime I learned crucial things that made me more capable of taking advantage of those circumstances when they came by.
There’s this girl I remember from that time. I was a bit older than my classmates, owing to that whole changing tracks thing, so a few gave me more credit than I deserved in some areas. This girl once walks up to me and asks me if I’ll read some stuff she wrote. I didn’t know how to say no, so I said yes. And it was terrible. No style, no flow, no command of language. It’s a high school essay at best, corny and florid in all the wrong ways. I weaseled my way out of giving her feedback and mentally discounted her as a writer.
She’s now a professional journalist involved in many high profile activist movements. I’ve read her stuff. It’s great. Turns out the reason she was bad at it back then is she was twenty and had many years of getting good at that crap ahead of her. That’s fine. It’s fine to figure yourself out and learn to do things as an adult. That’s supposed to be the point of higher education when it’s universally accessible.
Anyway, I don’t think you’re wrong, for the record. I think you’re right in your context. If public university wasn’t basically free around here that would have been a very expensive approach to learning creative writing and figuring yourself out. At most all I’m contributing is I’m glad we do it that way over here. I spent ten years, give or take, doing that stuff and I spent between sixty and six hundred bucks a year doing it. And that’s because I didn’t qualify for any grants or government student aid. For some of my classmates it was free, or they even got some help for books and housing. I go to vote every time (and pay taxes) thinking that contributing to keeping that up is the most important thing I do in life.