Fvck school (2012)
I dropped out after two years of college and don&#x27;t regret it even for a second.  These days, I&#x27;m:<p>-Doing data analysis with pandas on parking tickets just because it&#x27;s fun and it helps people.<p>-Freelancing for HFT firms and doing low level performance tuning.<p>-Playing the drums.<p>-Suing Chicago&#x27;s mayor.<p>-In the running for an amazing security engineer job.<p>-In the works to start algorithmic trading.<p>-Helping setup a giant LAN party as one of four cofounders.<p>A huge part of me thinks that if I&#x27;d continued college, I wouldn&#x27;t have had a chance to do even a single one of these.  My mental model would have just been too hyper focused towards Getting Paid to allow the mental flexibility to say &quot;I can do&#x2F;learn that!&quot; in most scenarios. I seriously don&#x27;t consider myself particularly smart&#x2F;intelligent - most of what I know these days is just learned through hard work and genuine curiosity, which college hugely inhibited.<p>One of the other comments mentioned that degrees open the door for you. Yes they do, but the places I&#x27;ve seen and worked at where that matters are incidentally the worst I&#x27;ve worked at.  Self education goes a long way as long as you teach yourself how to learn before you start learning. Employers are often very impressed by that quality, so it&#x27;s still definitely possible.<p>That said, many folk don&#x27;t like the fact that I didn&#x27;t to go college.  There&#x27;s often a lot of animosity with mentions of student loans and knowledge depth over width. &quot;Jealousy&quot; comes close, but it&#x27;s more seething and exclusionary than that.<p>College is useful if you want to learn things, but often a quicker and more holistic way to learn is to skip college altogether and teach yourself and save your future self from asinine student loans. This goes for folks who&#x27;re able to get their student loans paid, too. Maybe especially, since you have the money to get an apartment to learn your desired subjects, but also about life. :)<p>(edit: if this sounds arrogant, please let me know. I&#x27;m trying to better myself and humility&#x27;s a strong one I need to work on.)