One Semester of Computer Science

Fall of 2011. I enrolled in computer science, and the reason was not strategic. I had written a little C# in high school and I was the kid teachers came and pulled out of class when a machine stopped working, so it was the one subject where I already had a head start. I had never once thought about it as a career. It was just the thing I was already good at on the day a form asked me to pick something.

I lasted one semester. I would love to give a more interesting reason than the true one. The true one is that I partied. I was eighteen, I was out of my parents' house, and I made the trade every eighteen-year-old thinks he is making, which is that this is the free part and the serious part starts later. I failed out.

The line I told myself walking out was that computer science was not going to make me rich anyway. I meant it. I had already made money on the internet with no degree and I had all the arrogance that comes with that. I was not entirely wrong about school. I was completely wrong about the subject.

Hold that thought for fifteen years. There is a version of me who stayed, finished the degree, and became a very good engineer building somebody else's product, and I think about him sometimes with no envy at all. The road I actually took made me learn it the expensive way instead, on live systems, with my own money at stake and nobody grading it. I failed out of computer science at eighteen. The subject was not finished with me.