I am procrastinating. I’ll be honest, right upfront. These words spew forth from me in an attempt to avoid completing the business proposal I must complete for class by tomorrow. I am a college dropout. I am not afraid to admit that. My circumstances, being raised in a family of five boys with parents who did not make much money, led me to fight for an opportunity to attend college.
I made it but accumulated a lot of debt and ran out of the ability to pay for college before graduating. That, at least, has been the excuse that I’ve used all these years as to why I left. To be honest, that was part of it, but there were other factors. When I left, I took an IT position, getting paid more than I thought possible right out of college, yet I was making this money without my degree. Why did I need college?
I spent my entire childhood tinkering and breaking computers, then forced to fix them before my dad found out. I had on-the-job training since I was five. I don’t want to imply there is no value in college; I think there are a lot of young adults in the world who not only benefit from it but actually need it. I just don’t think that person was me. In fact, I found college boring. It failed to engage me.
I originally started out as an Aerospace Engineering major but was persuaded to change to Computer Science. The problem was that the introductory courses offered very little to me that I didn’t already know and moved too slowly. The failure of these courses to engage me, and the failure of guidance staff to identify this issue despite my erratic grades and mediocre performance, ultimately resulted in a counselor accusing me of being a drug addict, pushing me to decide to leave.
Stepping into my personal time machine, here I am, a father of three daughters, and a decision faces me in how to support their decision to go to college. Don’t misunderstand me; I will support their decision and offer them the best guidance I can, hopefully, devoid of my bias. The question is, how do you tell someone to go to college even though it may not be right for you and will leave you saddled with debt. There is no way to really know if college is right for you until you have experienced it for yourself. I thought college was right for me. It wasn’t.
Despite being comfortable with the decision that college was not the right choice for me, here I am back at it again (for about the fifth time), all due to a sense of needing to complete college so that I am not a hypocrite telling my daughters they should strive for college when their Dad has not finished. The crux of the issue now is that I miss spending time with my daughters because I spend every moment when I’m not working doing classwork for a degree that really will do nothing for me career-wise and not much more personally. I am stealing time from my daughters in order to set an example that I don’t really believe in myself. What kind of an example is that?
Tragic Words 