A College Update - Advice from the bottom

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, some of you may remember that I came to you all during my senior year of high school - asking advice and getting tips on college life.

Well I’d like to let you all know, I promptly ignored it all and have paid dire consequences. As of today, and for the next few weeks, I’m a dismissed college student. That’s right, my gpa which had been only barely passing, dipped too low for too long and GT dismissed me.

Upon finding this out I immediately phoned up my advisor to find out what to do. And the only reason I’m not freaking out and flipping out is that he told me that I wasn’t an unusual story here at Tech, and that my readmission would be automatic once I completed all the necessary paperwork. With this failure, I’m probably looking at 3 more years of school (bringing me to the level of 6 years for my bachelors). I had had the chance that I might get out in 2 more but it was skim even if I passed this Spring.

So now, I’m faced with the realization that that was my one fuck up. If I fuck up again, it’s game over and no save game.

So here I am to tell everyone else, all the younger dopers who can still heed advice from someone who has successfully failed out of college. Here’s what I did.

  • For the first 2 years, I skipped classes figuring I could learn better from the book. This is emphatically wrong 90% of the time for me. I say 90%, because 10% of the time the Prof’s english is bad enough that the book truly is better. But the truth is, you’re paying for the knowledge of this Professor, you may as well go and take notes.

  • I never studied enough. I didn’t cram all the time, but it was nearly my Standard Operating Procedure. And I used to think 3 days of study time was a good job by me, but it isn’t. Believe me. For a tough course, you need at least a week of test preparation.

  • Sneaking through projects. Group projects are my bane. I either end up doing it all or I find some way to not do any of it. Or, in the rare case my team is all working equally, we end up disorganized and working equally in our confused state. I can’t give you any advice except to say to be wary of the group projects. Having a leader always helps, a group project (in my experience) is not done well if it is democratic among computer programmers.

  • Misplacing priorities is perhaps my biggest downfall. Surfing the internet and writing on my blog has often slipped above my studies. TV steals my soul. The local game store has clocked amazing hours of my time lately. You have to know when to study and when you can afford not to study.

I know, this all sounds like doom and gloom, but if there is one institution which can beat the pride out of you, it’s a tough college on a mediocre student. I’m told I’m a smart person, and maybe I’m too smart for my own good - but right now, according to the academic institution I’m a 1.74 gpa dismissed junior, how smart does that sound to you? How smart will that sound to a future employer? If I ace all my courses from here on out, then I’m still looking at a 2.7 gpa when I graduate.

So, I’m behind the eight ball and am in for the long haul when I’m reinstated. If you’re a college freshman, learn from my mistakes and don’t risk what I’ve put on the line. This is a serious time and I’m only now beginning to take it seriously.

So what am I doing for the Fall? I already know my schedule, so I’m going to contact the professors and inquire as to the books and get them early so I can go over them beforehand. I have one programming course (one I’m retaking no so coincidentally) so I’m sort of acquainted with the language (smalltalk for those curious), but this is the class where I managed to not do anything. So I’m determined to know the language and find a team of people looking for an A in the class so that we won’t have any slackers. I need As from here on out.

I’m also getting my hobbies into a hierarchy. If I have an hour free, what do I want to do? Write? Read? Watch TV? I have to have a plan, if I leave stuff unplanned and unscheduled, then I’m asking for trouble - like the trouble I’m in.

Sadly, I expect most of the incoming students will read what I’ve read and either go “Duh!” or forget about it. I did it when I was a senior in high school. I miss it and wish I could hit reset and try this college thing all over again, but I can’t - so I’m playing massive amounts of catch up.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

2

I’ll add some advice from my experience as both a student and a TA:

Turn in your homework and projects on time.

Even if they’d be so much better if you worked on them some more. Even if you really don’t want to do them now. Even if there is no policy deducting points for late work, and you’re sure the professor doesn’t care anyway.

Grading late homework pisses off TA’s, because that way they can’t grade a whole stack of the same assignment at once- they have to go back and forth between answer keys or at least switch mental context. They don’t like doing that any more than you do, and unhappy TA’s grade harder than happy TA’s.

Speaking of switching mental context, turning in homework and projects on time usually also helps you on tests. If the class is decently structured, a test on some material usually comes shortly after you’ve been doing homework or projects related to that material. If you’re doing your homework late, you’re studying for the last test after you’ve taken it, and not focusing your mental energy on the material that would help on the next test.

I am 95% sure that I got an A in one class not because my work was any better than everyone else’s, but that I was the only one who turned in all my lab reports on time.

3

That’s tough ronincyberpunk…but as with all things there are those of us who have been there before.

I managed to accrue 6 F’s, 2 D’s and 2 A’s in the two semesters of my first year of college. I was then asked to leave and never darken their doorstep again. About four years later I started taking some classes at a local community college (which totally sucked because I had to get an advisor to sign off on my schedule every semester because with the aforementioned grades my cumulative GPA was below 2.0 for a looooong time). Anyways, I eventually transferred to a 4-year and made straight A’s (other than one B in Forensic Criminology). Even with that I still only graduated with a 3.1 cumulative. I also applied to (and got into) several really excellent Ph.D programs. In fact, flunking out was one of the main points in my personal statement - I mean, no sense in trying to pretend that it didn’t happen. One of my grad school professors did say, however, that during the departmental application review my GPA was a source of “some discussion.”

In any case, good luck.

4

Hey, ronincyberpunk. Just a question for you–if you were skating by on your projects and not doing any of the work–are you sure that this institution, and the major you were in, was really right for you?

I was a pretty mediocre student in college for quite a while. I barely squeaked through on my first degree. Then I switched majors. Suddenly, going to lecture and doing homework became things I enjoyed and actually looked forward to. It became really easy to ace my coursework because it felt like I wasn’t really working. Instead, I was devoting a lot of time to stuff I enjoyed for its own sake.

I think that, until I changed my field of study, I’d been motivated much more by a desire to prove how smart I was than by any genuine joy I could get from my education. I get the feeling that a lot of pre-meds, engineering majors, and other science/math/technical thing majors have a similar problem to the one I had. I felt a deep-seated insecurity about my own worth as a human being. I felt that the only real asset I had at all was my brain, and that, therefore, my entire reason for living was to be smart. And if I wasn’t impressively smart ALL THE TIME, and proving that I was really, really smart ALL THE TIME, that I wasn’t worth my daily oxygen. What made it worse was the sneaking suspicion that I really wasn’t any brighter than anyone else in my classes.

I see this syndrome a lot in my students now. I get the feeling that plenty of the pre-meds who show up in my intro bio class are motivated much more by fear of failure or by a need to prove themselves than they are by a genuine desire to do what they truly love.

Maybe being dismissed is a good opportunity for you to explore other options. I’m not at all implying that you aren’t good enough to do well in the area you chose. Nor am I saying that you necessarily have the same insecurity/arrogance issue I described above. I’m saying that maybe there’s something else out there that will make you happier than what you’ve been doing, regardless of your school records or anyone’s opinions about how you should be spending your life.

5

If I may also add some advice to potential college students, it’s not all about the GPA, either. You might have a good enough GPA to squeak by - do you want a doctor who “squeaked by”? Do you want a dentist who barely passed all his courses? You’re there to get an EDUCATION. Try to learn as much as you can while you’re there and all set up for it - it will never be easier later. Later there will be mortgages and jobs and kids.

6

Pssssh, like that would happen to me.

7

After mostly A’s in high school (math was my weakness) I got 3 C’s my first quarter in college. Mostly because of late partying and not studying. Fortunately I learned my lesson fairly quickly, but if I had made one B that quarter I would have ended up graduating with honors.

Threats from my mother also helped. Don’t mess with a small redhead, folks - they are dangerous.

8

That’s an interesting thought, and could certainly be part of the OP’s situation. But in lots of universities, you don’t even get to major-related coursework until during or after your second year. Those first two years are mostly laying the groundwork for students to then move into major studies. So whether or not you like your major, you STILL have to attend all the boring required classes.

9

But ronincyberpunk was in his junior year when he got dismissed. So he was probably taking courses in his major when his academic problems came to a head.

10

What are you studying?

This may sound like ‘quitting’ but have you considered a different college, one where the academic standards are easier for you to live up to? I don’t know tons about Georgia Tech but i’m guessing just by their website (and the fact that “Tech” has alwasy implied to me a high end college like MIT, caltech, etc)? A degree from somewhere other than Georgia Tech is better than no degree from Georgia Tech.

I myself noticed huge differences in the academic qualities of IU east vs IU bloomington. Had I stayed at IU east i’d be a 3.9 GPA havin mutha. Now i’m pulling in a 3.1 with alot more work.

11

Ronin, as one who has been known to ahem procrastinate, I’ve been thinking a lot about your OP. I admire your ability to see your own faults, but am a bit concerned you are looking at symptoms more than the root cause of your problems. There have been a couple of posts suggesting that perhaps you’re not performing well because it’s not the right school or major for you. My advice is that you’d do well to really examine why you were blowing off class, have trouble with group projects and misplaced your priorities.

A cursory search on causes of procrastination will turn up:

  1. Fear of failure - it’s a lot easier to not face something if you have concerns, real or imagined, of not succeeding.

  2. Fear of success - sometimes success, or the things that might accompany it, are as stressful as failure. Finishing school usually mean entering the work force and taking care of yourself – earning your keep. That can be a frightening prospect for some people.

  3. Rebellion - procrastination can be a “passive/aggressive” device for rebelling against parents or authority.

  4. Perfectionism - the tendency to want to refine things to the nth degree (addressed somewhat by Anne Neville).

  5. Boredom/lack of interest - this one is self-explanatory, but I think it’s the easiest to admit to and not always the likeliest candidate. Of course class is seldom as exciting as most other things you can find to do, but if you’re not as least marginally energized by some aspect of your major/proposed career then you should carefully reconsider setting out to make it your life’s work.

  6. Lack of energy - this seems to be more of a problem in high school, and possibly related to sleep / school schedule conflicts in adolescents. I didn’t read anything in your OP that indicates this is an issue.

  7. Problems with estimating time - this can be the time available to finish tasks or the time that a task will take. IME this just exacerbates other problems listed here, and might fit with some of what you said around priorities. Unfortunately the ability to estimate and deliver tasks on schedule is fairly important in the IT world (and very often not done well).

There are probably a few more, and it’s possible (probable) that you experience a mix of several of these. I’m not necessarily suggesting that you go visit the campus psychologist, but am suggesting that you should think as much about the “Why?” as the “What?” in your recent setback and try to address the root causes as much as possible.

Good luck.

12

One of the things you should be doing is figuring out exactly what you have trouble with. Be as specific as possible about what situations you don’t tend to handle well. Then try to figure out a way to work around that.

For example, if you’re not good at time management on the fly, make yourself a schedule so you’re not managing your time on the fly. One way to do this would be to get a study group- that way, you’re forced to work on homework at a specific time.

My problem was organizing papers. If you offered me $1 million for keeping a neat and organized looseleaf binder throughout a semester of class, I doubt I could do it. I’d wind up with some papers without holes stuck in random places (that I was Planning To Punch Holes In, But Later). I got around this by taking class notes in a spiral notebook. Simple, and that meant one less huge (for me) issue that I didn’t have to deal with.

You could even take the radical step of ditching the TV. We didn’t have cable in the dorm when I was in college, and I can’t stand to watch a staticky picture, so I watched very little TV during college. The only thing I can remember watching in five years was election returns the night of the 1996 election. I think it helped me focus on my studies. Maybe it would help you, maybe it wouldn’t.

13

Thanks everyone, today has passed with a rather unusual progression, from total pits to feeling okay to the pits again and back to almost okay.

To those who asked if the major is the problem, I was a CS major up until this Spring during which I dropped a class at midterm in which I had scored an amazing 18 out or 100 and promptly switched to a related major, what GT is calling “Computational Media.” It’s like CS with a heavier focus on Interface design and graphics. The majority of the major are game designers, I’m there because what I love to do is Web design. So there is no question that I’m in the right major and school.

The underlying factor, from what I can tell through self study and analysis (to throw some buzz words in) is that I’m a) lazy and b) unmotivated and lastly, I was finally just burnt out. This was my fifth semester in a row, and I couldn’t back peddle anymore, I couldn’t stay afloat without a rest.

There is a bit still left for me to figure out. Quite a bit.

Right now I’m trying to figure out what this means for my summer plans. I had an internship lined up on campus, but with the recent developments that is pretty much down the tubes. And so I am suddenly faced with an unexpected need to make money and pay rent. So plans are up in the air. I have faith it will all work out, but it’s rather unusual to think that I can’t take classes for over 7 months.

14

Been there, done that. My first attempt at college resulted in a cumulative of 2.1 after four semesters. At which point I ran out of money. Hard lessons that needed to be learned. After working for four years, I went back and got my degree (double major), with a 3.6 cumulative.

Good luck, it’s not an unusual situation, and just get it right next time.

15

What worked for me was to take some time off from school and work in the crummiest (only) jobs I could get. So I when I went back to school I was spending my own money and very motivated not to be stuck digging ditches (literally) for the rest of my life.