These douchey McDouchebags I went to high school with are all applying to med schools and graduate programs and la dee da succeeding in life. Meanwhile I’m graduating a semester later than I’m supposed to and I probably won’t go on to get my Masters. I’m aiming to work in a field that gets little…
Hey! Hey hey hey. I hope you feel better soon because I used to feel like this too, and in the grand scheme of things it’s a waste. I was “so precocious” during my formative years and excelled at literary pursuits in high school. I thought I was really something. I was a year young for my grade and so I started college at the University of Minnesota at 17 with Big Plans to major in English and go on to get every degree ever and just set the world on fire!!
But, to make a really long and depressing story as short as possible, I dropped out after less than two full years because I had made a mistake about my major and I didn’t know what I was doing or why, and I was also severely depressed and blah blah.
I spent a year at my dad and stepmom’s house, working at a title company and feeling like a failure. Eventually I moved out and enrolled in night school at a tech school, which seemed like my high school only with even dumber classmates, while still working full time at a title company and feeling like a failure.
After a while of that, things started to get really bad because people from my high school class were graduating college. And, as you mentioned, most of them were going on to do/had already done Really Cool Things. Lots of study abroad, law school plans, etc. I remember clearly one winter night at a bar. Lots of people from high school were there. For them it was their last winter break; for me it was just a weekend in a normal work week in winter. One person in particular, who I’d never thought much of, told me that he had secured a job as a production assistant for a show on HGTV. Not a big show or anything but I remember coming home and crying for hours about how everyone was finishing college and doing cool things and some people were even going to work FOR TV and I had no degree and no skills other than drafting title reports.
I finally made it back to a four-year college and ended up getting a degree in statistics, but I still kind of felt like a loser because I wasn’t like everybody else there. I had to catch up on math classes I’d never taken in high school because of my plans to focus on English and ignore stupid things like math, which meant being the only old person in a calculus class full of freshmen. I didn’t have any friends I’d met in the dorms the way normal students had.
Anyway, fast forward to now. I’m in grad school to get a Masters of Applied Statistics which should, by all accounts, open at least a few doors for me when I’m done. But it’s not what I was “supposed” to do and I still wonder how I even got here. Also, I could still think of myself as being at the bottom of the barrel because I’m at a school I don’t really like and which doesn’t have an amazing reputation in the stats world (LSU! Geaux Tigers!) which I picked just because it was cheapest…which was a very important factor since I didn’t get an assistantship because I was only provisionally accepted due to not having the best grades upon finishing undergrad.
BUT I no longer think of myself as a loser because all the people from high school who were unintentionally shaming me with their great achievements aren’t as amazing as I once thought. I know people who ended up with great research opportunities studying abroad in Africa and other places who still don’t have jobs or know what they’re doing. I know people who plowed through PhD programs and did really well and are still unemployable. My best friend from Minnesota graduated early and went on to the Peace Corps and then one of the best MSW programs in the country and now has a job but has to live with her brother and work a second job (plus as many odd babysitting and dog-walking gigs as she can cram in there) just to keep on top of her student loan payments.
SO ANYWAY…That is the longest thing ever and I just wasted a bunch of homework time writing it but I drank a bunch of wine and felt that it was imperative to impress upon you, and anyone else reading this, not to compare yourself to those people because it’s pointless and a vicious cycle and they’re not even so great. You probably won’t see or read all of this but it’s a good thing just to remind myself of every now and again.
(Source: ginger-gal-is-in-hiding)
