Hey Trevor, I'm glad you made your video on dropping out
of school because I'm basically in agreement with you.
I think school sucks, and I've been attending university now for almost four years, and
I've just -- I've come to hate it, really. Last semester I basically made the decision
to give up on school. I didn't go to the administration explicitly
and say "I want to drop out of school," but I stopped going to my classes in around October
and ended up failing my classes of course because I wasn't there for half the semester.
I still have scholarships, though, and they're still giving them to me.
I'm basically getting paid to go to school at this point, so I went ahead and signed
up for classes for the spring semester. Not within what was previously my major --
I'm not taking anymore physics classes -- but I just signed up for some random stuff
that I thought would be interesting. I am going to go ahead and fill out an application
for an Associate's degree just because I already have the credits for it, so I figure I might
as well get it, but I'm not going to finish a four-year degree and especially not in physics.
With physics in particular, thinking about the kind of jobs that that would get me, it
seems like I would either go work for the government doing research or I would -- and
not even doing research, I would be like a lab assistant or something like that, nothing
very interesting -- or if I went and got further education, maybe got a Phd or something,
I could do research for the government or I could enter into academia, and I really
don't like either of those options. I'm not a fan of either -- academia or the
government. I told some people about this decision.
I told my family and received some criticism. Kind of underlying this criticism is this
idea that if I don't force myself to do things that I don't want to do, then I won't be successful
in life, and I kind of think this is a terrible philosophy to take towards life.
If you're continually telling yourself, well, I just have to persevere through this bullshit
so that I can be happy in some unknown future, it's like, well at what point are you actually
going to be happy? Because I'm not happy now in university, and
I wouldn't be happy in the kind of jobs I would get with this degree, so at some point
it's just like, what the fuck am I doing? And personally I really don't think that obtaining
this degree is paramount to my survival. I think I can, hopefully, find something,
do something I really love without it. And I certainly don't think it's paramount
to my happiness to get this degree. I guess, like, I got accused of being a quitter.
Yeah, I'm quitting something that I hate. It's like you stop smoking and somebody accuses
you of being a quitter. It's like, well, smoking isn't really that
good for me in the first place, so... There was something else I wanted to say...
Oh! This idea that I have to finish this degree
now rather than, you know, take a break and finish it in the future.
Like it'll be so much harder, it'll be impossible to do it later in life.
And it's like, honestly, I wouldn't go for physics in the future, but maybe like if I
wanted a pure math degree or something, or potentially, I don't know, probably pure math
I think, but it would take me about a year of classes beyond the credits that I already
have to get a pure math degree, and I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to think in
five years that I could put myself through a year of college.
So I really find opposition to this decision lacking on the part of my family.
And I'm pretty confident in my decision at this point.
I think that I'll figure it out, and I don't need to know exactly what I'm going to do
in the future. You know, I'm twenty years old, I have time
to figure it out. And, yeah, that's about it.
