Amélia Liao 🍊😈 on Nostr: In retrospect, dropping out of undergrad was a bad decision, given that the sweng job ...

In retrospect, dropping out of undergrad was a bad decision, given that the sweng job I held for a year sucked ass, and it's (probably) totally shot my chances at an academic career. But it was the only choice I had!

I reckon just about everyone was in a pretty bad place in 2022, but I was doing bad bad. Not to get into the details, but the psychiatrist I went to (for my ADHD!) had me sign a liability waiver after I chose not to be admitted. So I wasn't exactly in the headspace to think about my future even five years on when I chose to drop out.

There's no way to write this paragraph without it sounding like bragging, but, like, I've always been pretty good at computering. I picked up programming at 7; I have blog posts about Haskell nonsense from when I was 14; and the year after I implemented a compiler for a typed functional language that grew to support most of GHC's complicated extensions(*). There was no shot I was failing any of my undergrad classes.

But that didn't matter! First semester, we had to take what amounted to an intro to programming class, that was taught in Python. I talked to the professor about testing out of this class, and he said something like "I understand where you're coming from but you'll have to talk to the coordinator". And so I did! After a few more escalations, the person in charge of all the science and engineering degrees told me that they legally aren't allowed to let me test out of the core curriculum.

That was in 2020, so the week after I went through the entire circus, we switched to remote lectures. And then even though I was nominally having to spend something like 18hrs a week having someone badly explain me something I already knew, I could just mute my browser and play osu! instead. It was a tolerable two years of picking up exciting knowledge about, like, for-loops and state machines and and proofs by induction and the same amount of SQL you'd pick up from w3schools.

But then we went back to physical lectures. One of the classes for that semester was functional programming. I attended the first lecture; we were to use a version of GHC which had had a minor bug fixed by me. It was too much. With a friend's recommendation I applied for a job at Obsidian Systems, a Haskell consultancy, and was asked in during the interview if I wasn't overqualified. The week I got my first paycheck I went down to the office and dropped out.