Why I left college after one semester.
I want to start off by saying Happy New Years to all. I pray for a productive and prosperous year for you all!
We all heard the myth before: College is the gateway to a great, prosperous life. That is 100% false. The problem with colleges today is that we assume a degree is necessary for everyone regardless of their interests, talents, and passions. Being a software developer, I wasn’t too excited about attending college in the first place. I knew my passion early on and was committed to my independent studies.
I know for a fact there will be some people out there that will say “That narrative is played out!” , “Stay in school, chasing your passion is not a safe route!” I get it, I really do. Everyone has a different mindset, different story, different motivation. And quite frankly those same people haven’t been in school in the last 10 years. The point of this piece isn’t to give advice, but provide a perspective from the next generation up.
My First Semester
During my first semester, it was so hard for me to focus and study for classes I thought were useless. Instead of studying and memorizing Avogadro’s number ( which is 6.022 x 1⁰²³ by the way ) and the mass of an electron, I was to busy writing programs and indulging myself in current tech news. My passion is what kept me up late at night. Most of the time I didn’t sleep because I was in the library trying to solve code challenges, reading documentation, and of course, I watched “The Social Network” every other night with my friends.
My team and I have won the Shop.com “App Contest”. It was a true eye-opener for me. Through all the stress that comes with all of our classes, we were able to create a great product and win the whole contest. We wanted to make a statement. A minority freshman team, disrupting the tech industry, That’s our goal and mission.
My Outlook
There are two types of environments in the world. You have a startup environment and then you have the traditional corporate environment. College has a real corporate feel to it. I feel like there is so much structure with a designed linear projection of where I am supposed to be in four years. The traditional way of learning is outdated, it is time for people to transition to project-based learning. The exploratory, project-based learning is the startup environment. You dedicate your time, resources on things of your interest and you learn while you are doing. That’s the type of environment I want to be in and is the reason I decided to leave college.
For 12 years of my life (I skipped my junior year of high school) I attended school 8 hours a day for 210 days a year. What was the outcome? It created a focus on short-term goals and objectives. The school trained me to look for the “right answer” rather than taking a step back to look for a unique answer.
P.S. I am still taking classes online 😬
That’s enough of me ranting about my viewpoint of college. I’ll save that for another blog post. Thank you for reading the beginning of my journey. If you agree with me or disagree with me, please drop your feedback in the comments section below.
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