@[email protected] I was very burnt out from high school, and I made it to a 4 year college and was overwhelmed with independence after coming from an overly strict and overprotective household. I failed college multiple times, and it took years before I managed to acquire an apartment and a vehicle. I eventually was able to have a stable environment to do community college online. Now I am going to do online university for Electrical Engineering soon (probably in a year or two, I plan on getting soldering equipment so I can learn to repair devices on the side as a side gig while I am doing college to keep myself afloat), and I have been recently accepted into the program.

If I could go back in time, I would have taken a break for a year or two after high school and focused on getting out of my parents’ home. It is a massive challenge to be independent, and this is necessary to master because college is way more intensive than high school. You will likely be pulling all-nighters, though that may be because I still struggle with time management to this day.

College is filled with a lot of bullshit, including ridiculous amounts of coursework, an unreliable way of gauging coursework by credits (I took way too many my first semester, start with 12 credits, please (even after reducing my credits mid-semester, I had to take more single-credit courses to make up the minimum full-time requirement, and they had a similar workload to 4-credit classes, and I had 4-credit classes that didn’t require a lot of work)), professors that will not teach and only give you assignments (especially online), crappy proprietary software and test-systems that will make you fail test questions even if you made the correct answer (looking at you, Pearson), etc.

Also, limit your extra-curricular activities to one or two, preferrably zero for at least your first semester. I was too eager to join many clubs, and then burned out even more, played video games in my dorm, and struggled to attend classes.

My state has a program to pay full tuition for “high demand” fields in community college, which made it possible for me to get a two-year degree. My head was in a better place, especially since your brain doesn’t fully develop until into your twenties. I really recommend online college. It comes with many of its own problems, and the courses are much worse in quality, but if you are an autodidact like myself, you will find better material online to teach yourself anyway. Online college makes it more feasible to work to support yourself as you usually don’t have to attend classes at a specific time (I had to attend one online class meeting during work for JavaScript, but the rest of my classes were online-only with assignments due each week (not self-paced)).

Be prepared to be disappointed if you do not acquire a job you hoped to achieve with your degree. To be honest, I may have a better chance getting an entry-level job in software development if I wasn’t building my Gentoo system from scratch and instead focused on practicing programming and making git repositories of web applications to show off to employers. I have spread myself very thin trying to customize my machine (biting off more than I can chew with my limited experience) while learning to be a jack of all computer trades (because I am paranoid about security and privacy, and often the alternative to surveillance tech is to DIY) on top of managing life responsibilities and working with PSL. But I am doing what I love to do, and I have always been interested in open source computer hardware and low-level programming. My hope to get a software development job to make ends meet before I went back to my true dream career pursuit was unfortunately not feasible, especially since I am competing with many experienced developers in the midst of massive tech layoffs post-covid. By the time I would get a software development job with a two-year degree, I would have invested so much time to make restarting from scratch to go into electrical/computer engineering much more risky. Plus, if I waited to go to college in the next 10-20 years, it may become $100-200K per year, which is why my focus is getting back into a 4-year degree as soon as possible.

If and when you do college, research reviews of colleges, and look up college experiences from students online (including reddit). I learned, for my university, the general education classes I will be taking first are typically done with many students in each class with a professor as a moderator that will not let you reschedule tests even if you plan in advance and even if you have to help take your family to a doctor’s appointment that day. The coursework in the first classes I will be doing is much less than the mid-tier classes, and it lightens a bit at the end, so I will likely take an extra class or two beyond the 12 credits for my first semesters, do strictly 12 credits for the middle semesters, than take maybe an extra class in the last semesters. Because of the side gig I want to do, I may just do only 12 credits for each semester for the entire degree. Also, I can expect lessons and assignments to have very contradictory instructions, and this is a frequent experience in software related fields. Ask or research online about specific classes when deciding your course schedule as students can give feedback on whether a course is bad or too much work in combination with your selected classes in the same semester.

And expect some hilariously liberal education, especially for the economics or business class that is shoved into your degree as a requirement.

Forgive my stream of consciousness and run-on sentences, lol, I typed this from my phone.