Ask HN: People who dropped out/failed grad school how did it affect you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: People who dropped out/failed grad school how did it affect you?

13 pointsmasterme15 comments

I'm currently taking an advanced Computer Science degree at a top British university. I've been incredibly successful in all my assignments and problem sets: achieving either full marks and always above 75%.

I'm currently half way through my finals and there is just so much to learn for my last three exams (all in the same week) I don't know if I will be able to pass (we need at least 50% in each exam or we can't graduate).

It has, without a doubt, between both the most rewarding and stressful year of my life. I didn't quite believe it was possible to learn so much in 8 months. However, should I fail an exam(s), I don't think I can go through the stress of resitting, just to receive a PASS at the end of it.

My question is to those who dropped out or failed grad school: 1. what did you do afterwards and 2. how did it affect your employability in your field of choice?

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I dropped out of grad school (MIT EECS) when I got up one day and realized I was only in it because it had seemed like a good career path, not something I was fired up about. I was doing reasonably well but not killing it by any stretch, but definitely could have wrapped it up and put that on my resume. Instead I just... didn't. I did f--- all for a few weeks (aside from a copious amount of bar hopping). Had a really awkward call with my parents. Then I pounded the pavement for work and used it as my calling card.

Company (all fairly small / start up level): Tell us about yourself.

Me: Got into MIT for grad school. Decided I wanted to get going doing things, not learning theory. Took a chance on myself and walked out the door with more debt than I'd like to think about but excited to see where my talent and ambition would take me.

Had three offers in the first ~10 days, took one, loved it for about six months, moved on. Almost three years later I've landed in a great spot, make a nice living, don't regret it for an instant.

Step 1. Get admitted to MIT

Step 2. ????

Step 3. Profit.

This is a really cool story, but if the OP isn't coming from somewhere as highly regarded, it may not be the best thing to hear.

You got between 75-100% on all assignments and problem sets yet not sure you can get above 50% on the finals. Doesn't add up. Sounds like you're just stressed out and not really in danger of failing.

The problem is the exam structure. The first half is written questions, but typically accounts for somewhere between 50% and 66% of the exam. The remainder is negative marking MCQs. Therefore, you can either get 100% on the first half and 0% of the second half or get relatively high marks in both.

The MCQs are normalized according to some normal distribution. Therefore, the worst you can get is 0. However, if you score > 0, but you get the lowest mark in the class, you receive 0 marks. To make matters worse, much of the questions are written in such a way that, if you have in-depth knowledge of the subject area, the questions become ambigious, because the examiner might not have fully considered all the ways in which the true/false statement can be interpreted or reasoned (I think this would require some kind of perfect human being?). In effect: mess up on the MCQ's and you're toast.

Hope that makes sense!

I don't understand why grad exams are graded on a normalized scale. Why do they want some people to fail every semester? (That grading structure sounds set up to fail some students.)

It eventually degrades into game theory where you're trying to predict how your classmates are going to answer the questions. If you play it too safe and only answer questions you are 100% confident in, you might not get a lot of marks. But you won't lose any marks either. If you friends play it more dangerously and answer questions they are 70% confident in, they could either get all those wrong (boosting your mark) or get them all right (lowering your mark).

On the one hand it's fascating. Yet on the other, it's absolutely terrifying.

You're explaining a student's response to the exam structure, but you're not explaining why the institution wants to fail some students every year.

If you care about student learning, you do a criterion-referenced assessment. If you want to compare students to each other, you do a norm-referenced assessment. Why is a grad institution more interested in comparing students to each other than in assessing whether people learned what they were supposed to learn?

When I started studying at university there was this guy who was in his last year, had only half a year to go, and then decided to quit. I didn't understand it at all. Six years later I did. I quit. I regret it.

I regret not getting the proper support. And I regret rejecting the support I got. I thought I will manage, and I still do, but... All those stories about Gates and Jobs and whoever dropped out and became a famous bazillionaire - most of us who drop out don't. My salary is OK, but certainly not great. If I look at what people earn after finishing university, that's a significant gap with what I get - even now.

If you don't pass your exams this year, try again next year. Maybe after ten or twenty years you'll look back and think that you would have managed without that diploma, but if it happens to be that you look back in regret - it won't be easy to take up your study and finish the exam. You won't have the time and energy. Why? Your job! It takes up most of your time and energy, and hopefully there will be a family - wife and kids, and they take up most of the rest.

If you were certain that you would be successful without diploma, you would already have a running business.

With respect, this says more about you than it does about your lack of degree. In our field, not having a degree is no longer stigmatized.

I can immediately think of five people who dropped out of college (or never even attended) and now make $300k+ per year in salary. None of them are famous. None of them got rich with a startup. They just worked hard in places like Google. These are people I have met or worked with who followed a typical career progression to its logical mid-late career conclusion.

I don't know what the reasons are that you never caught up to your colleagues with diplomas, but I can tell you that it's not your lack of diploma holding you back.

Look at the subject materials with the perspective of learning not finishing tasks. I'm back to school after 6 years in industry doing master's. I hate these assignments and some subjects I have to do where lecturer is just too much to tolerate. However, all subjects and it's contents are interesting. I have 3 projects to finish in 3 weeks and 4 assignments each week on top of that. Just thinking of them encourages me to quit. I feel depressed. I wake up at night worried and heart beat really high. But I think I have developed some resistance after all this time.Now I take all tasks from the persective of learning. When I think oh I have to finish this project, then I feel stressed But when I think "Oh, lets read what that is, and what about that, how does this work.." then the stress is far less

I ended up unemployed for 2 1/2 years - I was not ready for dropping out.

I did not even know what field I wanted to be in - just something that paid a sustainable living wage and could put me on a career track. I ended up teaching myself programming, and have become extraordinarily successful quickly, currently serving as a lead frontend engineer in a rapidly growing startup after 2.5 years in the field (~80 employees)

I damn near committed suicide. The depression lasted for three years. It was a struggle just to survive.

I expect that it's been a lot worse for me, that my resume says I attended grad school, rather than for my resume only to say that I have a bachelor's degree. However I am very insistent on stating that I attended grad school, even if I lose jobs by doing so.

There are a lot of people who fail their exams. It's quite common for graduate students to take ten years or more to earn their doctorates.

If you don't pass your exams, save up some money, go on vacation someplace nice, get laid - then go back to school.

You're not generally required to take any specific course as a graduate student. When you come back, take classes that interest you, not what you require to pass the exams.

> You're not generally required to take any specific course as a graduate student. When you come back, take classes that interest you, not what you require to pass the exams.

Sadly, all my classes are compulsary, except one, which we get to choose. They're also really interesting, in a field I love, and I've enjoyed them thoroughly. What has been a real struggle is the work load. I've effectively worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for the past 8 months (with some time off at Christmas). At this stage, I am mentally and physically exhausted.

> I damn near committed suicide. The depression lasted for three years. It was a struggle just to survive.

I'm very sorry to hear that. If I am honest, depression is not really something I have ever suffered from or something I ever felt: something that I am very grateful for.

If you don't pass your exams, I expect you could still stay in school. At that point you might not be required to take any particular courses.

I don't know about your school, and I was not a CS major. But at UCSC, the qualifier exam is given just once a year, shortly _before_ the start of classes in the fall. That's meant to enable really smart students to get out of taking any classes at all - if you pass the quals, you get an instant Master's Degree.

But yes, before we took the quals we did have specific course requirements. Very difficult ones.

I left graduate school because I became psychotic, not because of my grades. I'll tell the story but not just now.

Don't be a wimp. Stick it out until end of exams then decide.

As you said, rewarding and stressful go together. Love the stress. It reminds you that you are still alive. You will face this kind of stress load many times in your life. Embrace it, don't run from it.

As for managing the stress: If it is more than "you" can do, fine. What is the "you" which cannot deal with the stress? Name it, and let the stress kill it. Let the ego die. Ego is an illusion anyway. With ego gone, the mind can more clearly focus on the now, on the computer science problems or the taste of the coffee on your tongue. Life is good.

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