Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

I was sub 2.5 GPA person throughout career. But I started learning things that interested me. Got more and more good at it. And somehow got somewhere. It's not a bad life but good enough.

Throughout my life I felt like what your are feeling right now. But I would say things eventually fall in line of you are persistent enough. It may take some extra time but it will.

Regarding ADHD, I would recommend you see a psychiatrist and follow your routine properly.

Scored 1600 SAT at 13, 36 ACT/1590 SAT in HS. Was an absolutely terrible student and dropped out of grad school (Oxford). Never had a perfect GPA despite most classes coming easily to me, which of course made my life a hell when I encountered an actually challenging topic for the first time at University.

Intelligence is just one component of academic success and while it is a strong correlate, it isn’t a guarantee.

For what it’s worth, it is possible to get this on track. I eventually restarted school at UVM Medical School and did exceptionally well in my year there. You will need to find a system that works for you to handle the responsibilities of your academic workload.

My path sounds similar :)

I started at UC Berkeley in 2010 as a Political Economy major. Hated it, tried the intro CS class because I liked computers, loved that one, but struggled to find motivation for required math classes with tons of homework. Had to take a semester off to work to support myself. I made friends with great people at my student job, joining a cybersecurity team, doing some psychedelics. Didn’t scape the GPA together to declare CS major by the cutoff semester. When my friends started graduating, I gave up and dropped out.

I had no interest in FAANG types (at the time, they had very similar energy to those courses I hated) and looked mostly at startups. No one ever brought up my lack of degree.

I applied to Airbnb with a rec from a friend’s older brother in 2014 and got the job. Once you get that first job, no one will think about the degree. Since then I make enough to not worry about much. I’m about average with my friend group career wise; resume: https://jake.tl/resume.pdf

Sometimes when someone asks me a complicated question I say “sorry I don’t know, never got a degree” to elicit some eye rolls. My girlfriend hates that one.

I dropped out of Stanford with ADHD. I did well in high school without studying, but that didn't work in college. I went back to school a few years later and got a cheap degree. I worked my way up to a position of research geologist (my original goal), but I was deeply handicapped by a lack of knowledge. My advice is never stop pushing forward no matter what others say.

I wrote a Mac program to help ADHD folks in academic difficulty, but it didn't sell. It's now free from Apple's App Store. It's called Epiphany Workflow. It might help some.

Learn how to learn what you want so you can learn what you need that they're trying to gatekeep from you. The certifications/degrees are mostly meaningless. Yes, the academic setting can be helpful, but comes with so many toxic cultural components, it makes more sense to craft one's own learning environments outside of academia that are geared toward the science of learning.

You're not alone. I'm without a degree and conducting pioneering work as outsider science. We don't need the approval of or support from academia to do meaningful and impactful work. Learn how to creatively present what you can do so you can bypass standard funnels for things (like hand-delivering something you've made to demonstrate your skills to a hiring manager, bypassing whatever their hiring process is...people will poopoo this and try to tell you it's arrogant...let them sit in their own discomfort, as it has everything to do with their issues, not yours; if they ask if you think you're better than people using resumes, you can always say "everyone's better off leaving resumes behind because they'relargely bullshit. This is how it starts for me" if you believe it).

The metrics suck. Every human is infinitely valuable and anyone saying otherwise has a colonized mind. Also, seek out decolonization practices & therapeutic ways of being to protect from the self-harming thoughts/practices these systems naturally indoctrinate people into.

Remember: the moment you orient toward tearing down academia, they're locked in there with you, not the other way around. You become the torturer simply by being in a way they have no control/impact on. You are enough to liberate yourself from the torture by refusing to value harmful cultural norms and by speaking out against them. You are not alone in this. If you need support, my contact info is in my profile.