Poll: Do you have a CS degree?

I actually adored high school. There were 330 people in my graduating class. I graduated third, only a sliver of GPA away from salutatorian. There were 6 National Merit Finalists in my class (including myself) and one of the things that always drove me to excel in high school was the sense of competition with my very intelligent peers, along with the support of some amazing teachers who actually cared about us and would be actively disappointed when one of us didn't live up to our potential. Many of my advanced classes in high school were very small. We had 12 people in our AP Chem class.

Then I got to college and I was just another number. I lost my peer support group and any meaningful feedback on my work from my instructors and with it, my motivation.

Until that point in my life, I'd always had my sense of self and identity tangled up with academic achievement. I was a "smart kid". Doing poorly in college didn't just feel like a failure to get a particular grade, it made me feel like I was a failure as a person.

It took me years to get over that. In fact, I'm not 100% sure I am completely over it. But at least I don't let it consume me anymore.

You're more than your grades, you're more than college. There is so. much. more. to any single person than a single facet. If you think you'd do better in a smaller school, try to transfer before it's too late. Or if you decide that college isn't for you, don't beat yourself up about it. You can still well, especially in technical fields where skill is more important than a sheet of paper.

And get help for the depression, if you aren't already. I spent about a year on Effexor (and Ambien for the crippling insomnia that piggybacked onto my depression - it was terrible, I used to get auditory hallucinations of alarms clocks and phones ringing in the distance) and it truly made the difference. True clinical depression is a chemical blackhole in your own mind, and the drugs can give you the foothold you need to find your way back out of it.

To be fair, it is taught by the engineering department and has most of the same curriculum as the "computer science" degree - which we don't have here in Uruguay.

We do have a Computer Engineer degree which requires taking exactly the same math as any other engineering degree, and quite a bit of physics and chemistry as well. It's demanding and takes more time than an U.S. degree, so an engineering graduate is equaled to an U.S. master's in Computer Science.

I sometimes regret dropping out of the public university and switching degrees, but there were lots of strikes at the time which set me back two years (to me, it's amazing to see people graduate at 23 in the U.S.).