Ask HN: Totally depressed with my situation | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Totally depressed with my situation

10 pointsreturnofdjedi12 comments

Hii guys,i belong from india and i am totally depressed by my current situation.Brief way of how i think : I am totally fascinated by technology and how much it contributes to our daily life. The problem here is that everything here is about "rote learning" and marks and nothing much else . I feel totally depressed by this and i am not able to motivate myself to do anything because i hate this thing.Learning is about enjoying and having fun with it and building stuff.Due to this mentality i have just about wasted my B.tech engineering in Computer Science and can't seem to do anything at all.Future looks quite bleak with no jobs.

What can i do now?

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Hang in there. Things will get better.

I know a lot of people who feel the same way. In computer science, you can make your own path to a job:

1. Do interesting projects in open source 2. Using (1), apply for internships - offer to work unpaid 3. Using (2), get relevant experience on your resume 4. Apply for jobs - there are interesting startups that look more at skill than degrees.

These steps have nothing to do with your degree at all. You are quite lucky to be in CS where the skills matter more than the degree - make use of it!

Okay a brief more about me: 1)Missed out on gsoc by a little bit .. My idea discussion thread https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/archesproject/Ys4ejT...

2)After that kept on looking for open source projects ... found some to do as well ... but could not sustain it.One of the major problems is that i like to interact and discuss things and when that doesn't happen,i get disconnected!!I belong to a local engineering college in delhi and it becomes hard to find people who discuss stuff about opensource and other things.

Money or Grades cant buy you back what college could take from you - your fascination by technology.

Set your priorities and decide if that degree is worth the cost.

And what akg_67 said: Focus on what you like. When something depresses you, do something different.

okay i have thought of dropping out quite a lot but i don't see any people replicating in india anything of the sort of silicon valley guys who dropped out.I understand that india is still in its nascent stage and it will take time for a tech company from india to have a global impact but even then i don't see any dropouts who made a huge impact in tech sector in india.So how can i take such a risk?

One more thing i wanted to know, Can Indians get selected to various job links of startups or others posted in HN?What's the deal with it?

You can get selected, but only problem is not all of them sponsors. If they do, you are in luck.

Break out of the indian culture and look to get a sponsored visa by a company overseas perhaps.

If you don't think anyone will give you the opportunity to build stuff, just ...

Hire yourself.

Hmm .. Wow .. I have been looking for some project to build,can you suggest something which can be really useful ? Web development would be cool!

Why not end school with your best and go from there?

School seems like hell!!I just literally don't want to go there in the morning and just want to get back as soon as possible.The problem here is i don't find any excitement there.People just don't care about coding and tech and teachers have hard problems solving problems and it's a vicious cycle as jobs will only come by marks and marks will only come by "rote" learning.

Get into hacker mentality. Do what you need to do to get what you want! If you want job and job will come by marks, then focus on marks. If you want marks and marks will only come by rote learning, then focus on rote learning.

If you believe there is another way to go about it, you should try doing that. If getting depressed will get you there, then go at it otherwise you are wasting your time and energy by getting depressed.

Focus on things that you can control, focus on influencing things that you can influence. But if things you can't control or influence then either hack it or don't worry about it.

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