Autodidactic lifestyle

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Through my entire life, I have managed to achieve a great deal of success while simultaneously performing miserably in school.

The successful part, in case you care:

While all of this was happening, I could barely maintain passing grades through high school. My GPA was so bad the final semester that they wouldn't let me participate in the graduation ceremony (though I still got the diploma).

When I got to college, things got much, much worse. I've failed twice as many classes as I've passed. I'm on the verge of failing English Composition 101 for the second time. The only good that comes of it is access to several technical libraries. I've become very knowledgeable on the topics of PDP, formal language theory, digital logic, complexity theory, circuit construction, and hardware drivers within two years (all relating to my special interest).The way things are going, it looks as though I will be unable to finish the program.



I am very much considering withdrawing from college, buying a university library access card, and devoting a large portion of my daily schedule to independent research (with intent to produce publishable articles). I am very successful at making money through freelance software development and have a frugal lifestyle. I eat a repetitive diet of mostly eggs and oatmeal and can't drive for anxiety reasons. My rent and utilites are $450/month, and I have a few thousand dollars tucked away from my old jobs (in case of an emergency or bad month).

Does this sound like a dramatically bad idea?

One of the ideas of a college education is to make someone 'well-rounded', so that they not only know their specialty but are knowledgeable on many topics, like science, literature, history, government, etc... Trouble is, they didn't have the aspie in mind when they came up with this, so you end up with someone VERY knowledgeable in their area of expertise, like you, but not much else. Short term, you seem to be having financial success focusing on programming, but to get up to the upper echelon of the industry, you have to have that degree. Not everyone can drop out like Bill Gates and never have to look back.

In the short term, dropping out might not be a bad idea, as long as you can support yourself doing what you're doing now. Maybe down the road, with a few years on you, you can go back and do better in school. But don't discount other subjects as useless. Even if you don't make your living with history or psychology, these are good things to know as a citizen and a person in society.

A couple of ideas, You might engage with the topic in English Comp, you might just not write in the formal-normal, plain vanilla way they're looking for. That is, their standards may be too narrow.

I don't know whether you're formally diagnosed or not (I'm not). But this might be a case in which it's worth considering playing the aspie card, and the institution can make accomondations for you. (please have realistic expectations regarding this)

Or, maybe one or classes a semester, in fields you're interested in. Just to have that small amount of social interaction going.

That whole "well-rounded" crap is pretty much only an American thing. It gives colleges an excuse to milk more money out of you in addition to wasting your time. In England, for example, a Bachelor's only takes 3 years. Why? Because you only study your major. It takes less time, and you come out knowing more about your field of study than your average American counterpart.
Here's a sample undergrad math program from a college in London: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/undergr ... /structure

If you really want a degree, maybe see if you can go to school in England?

Oh no, that's not the problem at all. I failed the first time because I missed more than three classes.

English Composition 101 is a joke. It's an introduction to essay writing; I became adept at this in high school. I attended a public magnet school - free to stay in as long as you keep the grades. I scraped a passing grade because I loved going to school there (it's dedicated to the arts, but they have a department for mathematics and science) and I would have likely ended my life had I been returned to public school.


It's funny that you mention that. I got my formal diagnosis last week in the process of registering with the office of student disability. Right now it looks like I'll be assigned a "living assistant" - one of the psychology graduate students will be stopping by every few days to make sure I'm not neglecting my living space or having a psychological emergency. I'll also be getting automated text messages an hour before every class.


If only I could


I'm not going to quit without giving it deeper thought. For now, I'll keep doing my freelance work part time and attend classes.

You live in Alabama, is that also where you go to College?

Too bad you don't live in England, 3 year degree, no course requirements other than your degree requirements. However that is not how it works in the USA.

Check this link out, you have to scroll down a bit but towards the bottom there are many Aspie friendly colleges listed. Some of the things they might do, give you a single room in a quiet dorm, have a tutor available to help you with your writing, help you structure your time so you get your course load done and allow you to carry less than a full course load.

Asperger tips & tricks

On the other hand, grinding through College may not be your best bet, particularly since you are already getting paid for your skill set.

But, for the most part, having a bachelor's degree is like having a union card in America, when two people are being considered for a job and one of them has the degree and the other does not, nine times out of ten the degree person gets the job. They also get paid more.

I have a friend who's son learned cad/cam, he never finished college. He now has a job in his field and he was a little upset to discover that the other people who do the same job he does, get paid more. What is the difference? Yes, the other people have their degrees.

On the other hand if college makes you completely miserable. Take a leave, don't burn bridges, do whatever dance you have to do to withdraw from school properly, talk to the Dean of Students if that is part of it. I mean leave the door open if you decide you want to go back.

Where are your parents in this discussion? Have you told them what you are thinking about yet? Being a parent myself, I am just wondering....

Good luck!

Oh man, the money is great. The internship started at $10 an hour, they gave me an assignment they expected to take all summer, I finished it in a week, and they gave me a raise to $12. They made it clear that I would be welcome back as an employee, degree or no. As for freelancing, I'm currently getting enough jobs to make $800 a month, and it's growing quickly. The people who have been at it for years and have a great reputation can make more than $50k per year.


That's a good idea. Should I put this plan into action, I will do that.



My mother did not go to college and would never even consider me thinking about leaving (she'd get very angry and yell, as a matter of fact).

You never said why you were failing. It probably would improve the advice people give if they knew that.

When I went to college the first time, I flunked out, mostly from laziness, but also partly from depression. I managed to scrape by in English 101, and then flunk English 102 twice. 102 is pretty much just 101 part 2, and like you said, it's a joke. I managed to flunk it anyway, along with several other really easy courses.

When I went back to college, I went to a different school, and because I'd gotten some self-discipline in the meantime, I'm doing great now. I can't just say 'get some self-discipline', though, since I don't know if that's what you need.

One thing that hurt me the first time around was that I was mostly taking boring junk unrelated to my major (like the English classes) for prerequisite and general studies purposes. There were too many boring classes at once, so I didn't get to do much interesting. You could try spreading them out a little bit, if possible.

I've only recently gotten into the upper level classes, but they're pretty cool. It does get harder and more interesting than English 101.

I think if you do decide to leave school, you'll do alright, but I think sticking it out would probably be worth it.

I know several academics who got their degrees in England (mostly because they are English). Their system is extremely inflexible- for instance, what I am doing would not be possible at a British university. They really only get to study one subject, but the field I intend to go into requires me to be competent in several diverse subjects. The assorted gen ed requirements are often a waste of time, but the flexibility that allows me to pick and choose any classes outside my major is a huge benefit to the American way of university education.

Could you fulfill the English comp requirement by taking an online course and getting transfer credit? Maybe online college in general might be worth trying.

And you might need to matter-of-factly coach this person as to what you find helpful. And this person will need to understand that they're not some kind of overlord or boss, but instead a helper.

I studied C++ from 1998 to 2000 and tried to get a job summer and fall of 2000. Well, I was up against that the pre-Y2K hiring surge had already been made. Also, we had studied console style programming, not GUI. But the biggest thing were the human resource departments who acted like admissions committees to country clubs, and they only looked at corporate experience/work experience and I mean only. In fact, when I went to job fairs and showed people print outs of programs, I was actually putting them on the spot and embarrassing people. These were nontechnical people. They can't directly judge how good a program is. So, they take the easy and "safe" way.

So, work experience is a very good and excellent thing.

Of course, this was eleven years ago and things change. Ideally, one might like to have both, but between the two of them, I'll take the work experience.

Yup. Directly providing evidence of you abilities at a jobs fair or the like is ... suboptimal. A company isn't that likely to bring staff who are competent to evaluate technical artifacts like program code listings; their program writers/software developers/software engineers/etc. are busy. This likely hasn't changed much.

And yes, work experience beats no work experience most of the time.

So far, sounds like a plan.

I found myself in a similar situation as yourself when I was in University: there were a few classes that were interesting, but there were many distractions from the boring classes, and sometimes I partook of those distractions too far.

If nothing else, the 3.5 years I spent (finished early) were an exercise in seeing through 1/3 cool stuff, 2/3 dumb s**t. Mainly to see if I could do it. I suppose it ended up being like climbing the mountain in my head. In the end, I finished.

I wish the US university system would just require your major classes to graduate, but still let you take other stuff. Sadly, I don't think that'll ever happen.

That is actually the set-up I have.