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

So, depending on what makes the kid an an outlier, they might struggle in this system that wasn't designed for their needs.

I've dropped out of highschool due to lack of attendance, lost almost 4 years trying to figure out what is wrong me. Put my parents through hell, wasn't nice. In the end I've realized that I wasn't depressed because of childhood traumas or whatever, but because I wasn't able to commit to studying, or to be able to properly focus on anything. Which in turn made me feel like shit, vicious cycle. Getting through high school would be easy, but that wouldn't fly in college. I literally read one page of notes and went to do 10 different things, before I realized that I'm supposed to do something else.

I'm writing that because a lot of helpful people tried to figure out what is going on with me, but I think that I've hidden the real thing (focus issues, missing some basic social queues, thinking "too fast") that was "different", so well, that I only could have realized that I have something ADHD-related at 24, as an adult.

Anyways, finished high school alternatively, now doing 2 degrees at uni, it's the exact same struggle, but I know myself better and it kind of goes. Medication is terrible, it's either methamphetamines for life or nothing. My grades are still terrible, but you can find your worth elsewhere.

I am both incredibly happy and frustrated it was pre-me that post-COVID online schooling gets more credit and justification for people with various struggles. I know that it would have saved me at least 2-3 years, so I look out for what is going on in that field. Cheers

Only you can really answer this and it is a big step on the path to life long learning. Look at the parts you control vs external locus. Then move on, don't dwell, the only way is forward.

The ADHD thing will depend on who told you.. was it a professional? If so I would try to see why they diagnosed you that way and again self-reflect, what do you have control over and would medication or adaptive strategies help. If it was just a concerned comment from someone you trust, then maybe get evaluated. Again just reflect on it and come to your own answer. Maybe it is nothing.

There's a lot going on in a CS degree program across a wide range of intellectual subjects. What might be helpful is to think about what the CS programme is really trying to teach and that is how to learn and operate at these various levels of abstraction and how to come up with new levels of abstraction (or at least introduces you to thinking in that way, basically what people now term computational thinking. We use these abstractions to study computation itself and the world etc...

So to translate, in the "real world" you will be writing software at various levels of abstraction to solve some problem domain. That is why the degree is useful. The specific implementation details depend on the job itself.

But you can have a successful career just operating at one level of abstraction and know it well. Cobol programmers are still in demand for example. :)