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Messed Up my college career.....what do i do now
sedsdon
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
I went into college a somewhat sheltered person and i completely blew the last two years of my life.
When I got to school, I met a group of friends who I can honestly were the best fit for me socially. This turned out to be a bad thing because i soon found myself playing video games or drinking with them all the time. Long story short my first semester I hardly went to class and ended up with Two D's and Two F's. I went back on academic Probation. My second semester it was more of the same and I ended up with Two C's a D and an F. I was then suspended for my Fall semester of Sophomore year. I took classes at my local community college and did pretty well with 2 A's and 2 B's. I was accepted to come back for my Spring Semester, and i once again screwed up and ended up with 3 D's and a C.
I never had this problem in High school as i left with a 3.3 GPA. What am i supposed do with my life? I wasted two whole years and do not know what to do with myself. Any response would help. Thanks.
When I got to school, I met a group of friends who I can honestly were the best fit for me socially. This turned out to be a bad thing because i soon found myself playing video games or drinking with them all the time. Long story short my first semester I hardly went to class and ended up with Two D's and Two F's. I went back on academic Probation. My second semester it was more of the same and I ended up with Two C's a D and an F. I was then suspended for my Fall semester of Sophomore year. I took classes at my local community college and did pretty well with 2 A's and 2 B's. I was accepted to come back for my Spring Semester, and i once again screwed up and ended up with 3 D's and a C.
I never had this problem in High school as i left with a 3.3 GPA. What am i supposed do with my life? I wasted two whole years and do not know what to do with myself. Any response would help. Thanks.
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You don't care about your education. Your two choices are to either start caring about it or give it up and just look for a job.
The key here again is that you need it get you priorities straight and focus on your studies. To echo what others have said, if you can't do that now, then you might best be served by going and working a regular job for now while you mature some, and go back to school later when you can handle it.
Anyway, if you do manage to finish, most places (especially after your first job) don't care about GPA. The only jobs that I've encountered that even asked about it on the application are ones designed for people with 0 experience who just graduated.
I would focus on what went wrong when you went back to the four year school after your community college time, figure that out, and then decide whether going back is a good decision. If your issue is simple time management/prioritization, the four year uni almost certainly has counseling and other resources to help you with that (talk to an academic advisor.)
If nothing else, you can ultimately be thankful that bad time management is punching you in the dick now and giving you the opportunity to learn these lessons, as opposed to getting into the professional world and discovering then that being smart and willing to show up and give half to three quarters of a fuck isn't good enough anymore (ask me how I know.)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
At 16 I finished "compulsory" education and stayed on till I was 18 doing "further" education - both I like to think I did pretty well in and was a model pupil (aka, nerd
So why I am telling you this? For me education itself wasn't the issue but rather the setting. University was all self control and doing things for yourself where as at college I was still a pupil in a classroom - at 18 / 19 I needed that discipline and structure.
If you are not getting on well at one place, but you get on well at the community college then could you just not stay at the community college? IMHO there is no shame in saying to yourself that one style of education works for you but another style did not.
Went to work as a Pianist on cruise ships for 3 years. Ended up loving it, but 3 years was exactly too long, so I was looking to go back to land, and since I was also changing countries(met my fiancee who's Canadian), getting a work visa was a pain and hey, what if I finished school?
Yeah applying was a pain. I had extra interviews to go to, and had to write a few letters explaining why I had done so poorly(Pretty much that second year where I gave it my all, got great grades, and still got booted from the department made me angry enough to just give up), and had to go through some more extra entrance stuff.
Now that I'm in? Good grades, I'm not missing assignments, I'm keeping up with everything, and I'm even planning on staying on for an MFA.
If school isn't your bag right now and you can be sure you'll have an opportunity to return in the future, just go ahead and take a break. If you're not yet ready for University, then you're not yet ready for University.
However, if this is a "one and done" sort of thing, or you really want to finish now.... Just go through that and apply yourself. If you're doing the readings for the classes and doing the homework, passing the classes is a breeze. Just go to class and stuff. If you apply yourself to class heavily as your first priority, you'll be amazed at how much free time you still have, and using that for whatever is fine and great if you're doing your classwork first
In the grand scheme of things, no one really cares how long it takes you to go through college.
If you really want to go to college then quit putzing around and do it. It's your time, energy, and money being thrown away (or your parents, but the debt will be yours).
If you don't want to go to college, then don't. Find out what it is you want most, find out what it takes to get there, and then start on that path.
Agreed. Part of the question here might be "why do you want to go to college." If you want to go because you want to get a good job, then looking at vocational training would be a really bright thing to do. Check out Mike Rowe's website and see what he has to say on the subject. If you want to go because you've been going to school for ~12 years or so, and you want to keep going to school, then you should carefully evaluate how much you are willing to pay to continue doing that.
I'm smart, got great grades in high school without trying, and then was a horrible student in college. I went in and out of academic probation, left on my own to try something else, went back to college, flirted with academic probation again, then got kicked out. It hurt.
Years later, with a successful job and a much better mindset, I went back to finish my degree. Full time job, full time student, and I was then also a husband and father. Finished my coursework with straight As, got my degree, felt great.
Your feeling of having wasted 2 years? I had that in a big way. I had so much regret. But I couldn't move forward until I reset my mind and stopped regretting things that had already happened. I'd say "oh man, I wish I had gone back to finish my degree 2 years ago," wouldn't do anything, then 2 years later "oh man, I wish I had gone back to finish my degree 2 years". So silly in retrospect, but that's what it looks like when you're paralyzed by regret.
So if I went back in time to where you are now, ghost-style, I'd tell you that you're clearly smart enough to get a degree. Get it. Get it done. Just get through it. Think in terms of the long run. Just having the degree will open up so many more doors for you, even if you don't work in the field your degree is in. By slacking off now, you're making your future more difficult. You like drinking and playing video games with your friends? If you do less of that now, you're making it so your future self will have more money to buy fun things and will have more time to enjoy them.
I think whatever is distracting you from schoolwork is also going to distract you from whatever other goals you may set for yourself. There is a sort of internal base frequency that I feel I can tune into whenever I am successful in life. It's the same frequency that gives my days structure and purpose; wake up in the morning, prepare breakfast, have coffee, read the news, go somewhere to work, come home, do some errands, do something fun, etc. Do your days have a routine, or do they meander kind of aimlessly to whatever happens to tickle your fancy? Start with some routine, and then focus your energy on sticking to it. This will give your days the necessary structure you will need to focus on your work. Once you establish this routine and adhere to it, you'll find that you'll actually have an abundance of guilt-free time to enjoy, ad will be a happier person for it. I've never met anyone who regretted the effort to get a an A in a class. No matter how dumb it is, you always feel better owning it than doing a half-assed job.
Like @wonderpug I was a model student in high school. High school was just so easy (this is not a good thing) that I didn't ever have to study or work hard on anything in order to get A's. I could skip class, get stoned, dick around, and I would still have a great GPA. If this is a story you've heard before (and already seen on this page) that's because it's common for a lot of nerdy people. We excel without trying, and it comes back to bite us on the ass at some point. You've hit that point. Wonderpug hit that point in undergrad. And, I hit that point in grad school.
From my first semester, I had problems with the faculty. There was exactly one professor that I liked, and while I took as many classes with her as I could, I was forced to take courses with some of the other instructors. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I hated that place. I had finished all of my course work early when it came time to work on my thesis. This was back in April of 2008. I screwed around, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how much I hated the department and wanted to leave. I let my anger at the department stop me from graduating in December 2008 (which would have been a full semester early for the MA program I was in), and then I got depressed about not doing the work I knew I had to do. This created a huge spiral of self-loathing and shitty feelings. I wasn't performing as I should be. What's wrong with me? Why am I too stupid to finish this bullshit program?
I allowed this thinking to dominate my life until relatively recently. I finished my thesis and received my MA in May 2013... I had to suck it up, realize that I was to blame for my poor attitude and inability to follow through, and I did it.
Please learn from all of the cautionary tales you're seeing on this page.
I graduated high school, and went to a major University. Two semesters later I had to drop out because I liked everything about college but the classes and the school work and all that.
I then went to community college, where it was just like high school, and I didn't like the environment, so I dropped out there immediately after a semester of dicking around and not even trying.
Fast forward a few years of scraping by, living on my own, etc, and deciding to go back. I basically needed the maturity to go to college, and didn't have it the first time around. So maybe you need to do the same thing. Just go live life, goof around, do all that stuff that you couldn't while in high school, and when you're ready to go back do so.
When I came back, since it had been like 4 or 5 years, I mostly got all the previous failures on the record, put on academic and financial suspension for the first year to prove that I was really ready to go back. I had to redo all the courses, or their equivalents, to get those essentially removed. I also went full-time during the day, and was easily the oldest person in the room until the crash in '08.