Anonymous wrote:OP, you are getting a ton of conflicting advice, I think which is lending itself to your paralysis.
What's key is to remember is that typically when seeking counsel, you're going to look at someone's resume. Here, you have no clue who is a random SAHM who married well born after going to some random private non-Ivy university, on third thinks they hit a home run, vs who is a POC with similar parents and similar opportunities. The latter group would have varied experiences that you should consider and I would suggest you take the former's advice with a huge grain of salt.
It would be interesting if you'd ask the posters to give a little background info such as (a) tier of school they graduated from (i.e,. HYP, Seven Sisters, Big Ten), (b) current income/field and (c) if they had strong standardized test scores (just guessing that you do based on the two threads). You want to hear from POCs who also went to Ivies or similar who didn't have totally smooth sailing (which is all of us I bet) but who stuck it out and how their degrees have helped them, if at all.
Snort. No one cares about your SAT scores in the real world.
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
Yes. Why did the school take away “all” the financial aid. That’s calculated by FAFSA and css. Schools don’t take away financial aid unless there’s a reason. Merit, maybe - depends on the terms, but financial aid? No, and that does raise a red flag
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
Yes. Why did the school take away “all” the financial aid. That’s calculated by FAFSA and css. Schools don’t take away financial aid unless there’s a reason. Merit, maybe - depends on the terms, but financial aid? No, and that does raise a red flag
OP here, it's because my parents' income recently went up. But I know that anything I do, no matter what, will be a red flag to employers. It just seems so pointless to optimize myself for the eyes of HR recruiters or employers when I'm literally a walking red flag.
Anonymous wrote:OP, you are getting a ton of conflicting advice, I think which is lending itself to your paralysis.
What's key is to remember is that typically when seeking counsel, you're going to look at someone's resume. Here, you have no clue who is a random SAHM who married well born after going to some random private non-Ivy university, on third thinks they hit a home run, vs who is a POC with similar parents and similar opportunities. The latter group would have varied experiences that you should consider and I would suggest you take the former's advice with a huge grain of salt.
It would be interesting if you'd ask the posters to give a little background info such as (a) tier of school they graduated from (i.e,. HYP, Seven Sisters, Big Ten), (b) current income/field and (c) if they had strong standardized test scores (just guessing that you do based on the two threads). You want to hear from POCs who also went to Ivies or similar who didn't have totally smooth sailing (which is all of us I bet) but who stuck it out and how their degrees have helped them, if at all.
Snort. No one cares about your SAT scores in the real world.
It’s to locate people with similar strengths as she has dummy. Assume yours weren’t high.
Anonymous wrote:Also, I'm not sure if you're cut off from Colombia's resources, but absolutely see if they have a career counselor willing to talk to you. They can sit down and discuss how this affects your future with better insight than the folks here. And they've seen students in your position, and genuinely want the best for you.
Just recently I met with my grad advisor. I wanted to find an easy summer class to knock out that could be lowkey enough to not kill me during my current work crunch. Figured out I could take a class and save a couple grand and finish a semester early if I just packed it in tighter. He begged me to reconsider. Said he's seen more and more students coming back for second degrees as students have been going that route. They get burned out and get nothing but the diploma. School is really what you make of it, and you need to get something besides the paper.
I'm taking his advice and have taken the summer to leisurely research and plan my thesis before I need to get started in force. It's honestly been really nice, and has made me way more excited to work on it than I otherwise would be.
OP here. I agree with you, but the posters here seem to disagree. Idk, it seems like everyone here is saying that it doesn't matter if I graduate from Columbia burnt out and with nothing really worthy of note at graduation (connections to peers, professors, meaningful research or extracurricular experiences, etc.). They all seem to be saying that as long as I get a Columbia diploma, it'll give me a leg up in the job market forever -- even though I am super burnt out from school and also don't feel like I'm getting anything out of Columbia (connections to peers, professors, meaningful research or extracurricular experiences, etc.). I've been rejected from almost every single student club and research position I've applied to, I have no close friends, and my professors mostly tolerate me as a warm body in their class.
Don’t feel bad about not getting into clubs or finding research internships. Columbia is a tough place. My son is there. He has been rejected from every single club. Has not been able to find any sort of lab internship either. And he said the competition of trying to interview for top finance firms and investment banks is crazy. It is a sink and swim environment which gets him down sometimes. But he likes most of his classes although a few have been brutal. And he likes NYC. There is more to the school than the crazy competitive kids but it can do a number on your self confidence
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
I’m pretty sure Columbia does not have grade inflation or very little.
It is not a nurturing environment unlike Yale, Harvard and Princeton.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
This should be fine, if you say your parents income increased and school dropped your aid. And you are trying to navigate a more sensible economic decision.
NP here, it would absolutely NOT be fine. If someone left an elite school with only 3 semesters left, it marks them as a loser, a quitter, and a lazy worker with no perseverance. Anyone with even a tiny amount of grit would've sucked up the student debt and stayed at the school, since they had already invested so much time and money into it. $80k is NOTHING when you consider that restarting would be much more expensive (both time-wise and financially). Any student with even a small amount of common sense would realize that leaving Columbia five semesters in is equivalent to academic and professional suicide, even if it's because the school dropped all of your financial aid.
Friend, she still got in to Columbia. they know she's not lazy.
OP, you're gonna be okay. If you put your mind to it you can finish at Columbia. If you want to come back to school later, you will (though I'm not sure I would count on one of those nice schools giving you a full ride). But if you don't, it's probably because you found something that made you happy. It might suck for a while, but you're gonna find something that makes you happy regardless.
Also fwiw, I've never had these types of issues but I heard family cutting ties (financially or otherwise) is rarely permanent. They want what's best for you (probably), and they'll want to reconnect. I know this is probably a really taxing part of the decision.
Not finishing at an Ivy, especially given the crazy grade inflation they have, is a big red flag that OP is a lazy POS. PP, you sound like a loser.
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
This should be fine, if you say your parents income increased and school dropped your aid. And you are trying to navigate a more sensible economic decision.
NP here, it would absolutely NOT be fine. If someone left an elite school with only 3 semesters left, it marks them as a loser, a quitter, and a lazy worker with no perseverance. Anyone with even a tiny amount of grit would've sucked up the student debt and stayed at the school, since they had already invested so much time and money into it. $80k is NOTHING when you consider that restarting would be much more expensive (both time-wise and financially). Any student with even a small amount of common sense would realize that leaving Columbia five semesters in is equivalent to academic and professional suicide, even if it's because the school dropped all of your financial aid.
+1. There is literally nothing she can say to explain away dropping out of Columbia. I had a classmate at HYP diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and he finished out the degree. OP, if you don’t finish your whole life is a red flag. Nothing you’d do would make up for it. And it’s unlikely you’re going to marry well because frankly, you’re annoying and also depressed (and not already dating someone).
You have to finish or your life is going to be hell.
I hope this is not the advice you would give your own child. Very harsh and pessimistic.
There are many exit and on ramps in life
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
I’m pretty sure Columbia does not have grade inflation or very little.
It is not a nurturing environment unlike Yale, Harvard and Princeton.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
This should be fine, if you say your parents income increased and school dropped your aid. And you are trying to navigate a more sensible economic decision.
NP here, it would absolutely NOT be fine. If someone left an elite school with only 3 semesters left, it marks them as a loser, a quitter, and a lazy worker with no perseverance. Anyone with even a tiny amount of grit would've sucked up the student debt and stayed at the school, since they had already invested so much time and money into it. $80k is NOTHING when you consider that restarting would be much more expensive (both time-wise and financially). Any student with even a small amount of common sense would realize that leaving Columbia five semesters in is equivalent to academic and professional suicide, even if it's because the school dropped all of your financial aid.
Friend, she still got in to Columbia. they know she's not lazy.
OP, you're gonna be okay. If you put your mind to it you can finish at Columbia. If you want to come back to school later, you will (though I'm not sure I would count on one of those nice schools giving you a full ride). But if you don't, it's probably because you found something that made you happy. It might suck for a while, but you're gonna find something that makes you happy regardless.
Also fwiw, I've never had these types of issues but I heard family cutting ties (financially or otherwise) is rarely permanent. They want what's best for you (probably), and they'll want to reconnect. I know this is probably a really taxing part of the decision.
Not finishing at an Ivy, especially given the crazy grade inflation they have, is a big red flag that OP is a lazy POS. PP, you sound like a loser.
Columbia does not have crazy grade inflation. It is not a nurturing school like Harvard, Princeton or Yale
OP - get mentally strong and then make the decision that is best for you. It will be fine.
Believe in yourself and focus on being happy.
Life is not linear for most people. Just because you had a big setback does not mean your life is over.
Things have a way of working out. Be optimistic and find supportive and kind friends
Anonymous wrote:You act like the only choices in life career-wise are crazy high stress $$$ finance, big law and medicine careers or low paying non-profit work.
The truth is that there is a whole spectrum. Finance can be a little more chill if you are at a company like PWC rather than Goldman Sachs but you can still make decent money. There are zillions of mid tier companies where work life balance is reasonable but you are not being paid 45-50 k like at a museum. Finish your degree and get a decent job. Or take a year to go into the Peace Corp and then get a decent job. There are students at Columbia who are not interested in working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Amazon and Google. They exist. You need to expand your social circle and get out of your bubble
+ 1
My husband has a "medium" finance job. Makes around 800k, works ~ 40 hours a week from home. We live in a MCOL city. You don't have to be Goldman Sachs/Wall Street or bust. There are plenty of jobs in the middle.
I have a humanities degree, a low paying job with a "mission" that supposedly justifies the low pay, and I don't recommend it! lol
Troll
not a troll. people in that field make 2 million bonuses regularly.
Anonymous wrote:You act like the only choices in life career-wise are crazy high stress $$$ finance, big law and medicine careers or low paying non-profit work.
The truth is that there is a whole spectrum. Finance can be a little more chill if you are at a company like PWC rather than Goldman Sachs but you can still make decent money. There are zillions of mid tier companies where work life balance is reasonable but you are not being paid 45-50 k like at a museum. Finish your degree and get a decent job. Or take a year to go into the Peace Corp and then get a decent job. There are students at Columbia who are not interested in working for Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Amazon and Google. They exist. You need to expand your social circle and get out of your bubble
+ 1
My husband has a "medium" finance job. Makes around 800k, works ~ 40 hours a week from home. We live in a MCOL city. You don't have to be Goldman Sachs/Wall Street or bust. There are plenty of jobs in the middle.
I have a humanities degree, a low paying job with a "mission" that supposedly justifies the low pay, and I don't recommend it! lol
Troll
not a troll. people in that field make 2 million bonuses regularly.
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
This should be fine, if you say your parents income increased and school dropped your aid. And you are trying to navigate a more sensible economic decision.
NP here, it would absolutely NOT be fine. If someone left an elite school with only 3 semesters left, it marks them as a loser, a quitter, and a lazy worker with no perseverance. Anyone with even a tiny amount of grit would've sucked up the student debt and stayed at the school, since they had already invested so much time and money into it. $80k is NOTHING when you consider that restarting would be much more expensive (both time-wise and financially). Any student with even a small amount of common sense would realize that leaving Columbia five semesters in is equivalent to academic and professional suicide, even if it's because the school dropped all of your financial aid.
+1. There is literally nothing she can say to explain away dropping out of Columbia. I had a classmate at HYP diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and he finished out the degree. OP, if you don’t finish your whole life is a red flag. Nothing you’d do would make up for it. And it’s unlikely you’re going to marry well because frankly, you’re annoying and also depressed (and not already dating someone).
You have to finish or your life is going to be hell.
I hope this is not the advice you would give your own child. Very harsh and pessimistic.
There are many exit and on ramps in life
No, I wouldn’t give my own child this advice unless she was in similar circumstances. For my own kids, they don’t need to prestige chase. But they are being raised to know it’s just important to work hard and be kind rather than focusing on results.
We can afford to do this because of the multimillion dollar trust funds we’ve prepared in their names. That is not OP’s reality - my parents were worse than OP’s, which is why I made so much money.
Anonymous wrote:Try to stay positive and finish the degree, OP. That Ivy name will open doors for you forever. A high school friend of mine who went to an Ivy (likely yours, based on your description) just bought a $14 million dollar McMansion at age 34! Meanwhile my DH and I will not come close to that amount over our lifetime. Then again, we didn’t go to an Ivy. We all went to the same high school and our friend wasn’t even in the top 10% academically, but he had a special interest/talent and decent grades, and I guess that was enough to be admitted to an Ivy in the 90s.
LMAO. Most Ivy grads will never get to such an accomplishment. Your friend is either an extreme outlier or had rich parents help him buy the McMansion. Absurd to use this one random anecdote as proof OP should stay.
He works for a top financial firm. I personally know a handful of Wall Street people who retired in their late 30s and 40s with $50-100 mill. My friend’s parents are middle class at best. His boss went to the same Ivy and took a chance on him early on. My friend works a ton, but he loves it.
OP here. I would literally rather go to jail than go work at Wall Street (and I was in prison for a day after getting arrested at a protest, so there's that...)
A number of posters have called you spoiled/ungrateful/entitled, and I am sensing some of that too. What separates the people on the top from everyone else is their ability to delay gratification. Grunt it out. Not everyone is cut out for this, but then don’t complain when you cannot afford stuff in life.
OP here. You're right. I guess I'm tired of delaying gratification. My entire life up until this point -- my parents screaming at me to perform academically to their standards, trying a STEM major and failing, trying to tough it out at a notoriously competitive school that I hate -- has been a series of delayed gratification. It's just that achievement seems empty at this point, and I want something more immediately tangible and pleasant. I am tired. I am so, so tired of trying to delay all these awards when fundamentally it seems like meaningless bullshit that I don't care about. I don't see the point of sticking it out in the rat race since it seems like the rewards are too far off for me to enjoy.
Yes, I'm aware that makes me spoiled/self-indulgent/entitled. I think it's because I was raised by Asian immigrant tiger parents to delay gratification for so long that I'm super burnt out and tired of everything.
PS: It's hard to delay gratification during a difficult, trying job when you're actively suicidal as a college student. Idk, I think my mental illness is calling for me to stop delaying and instead search for more immediate and more intrinsically meaningful things.
Ok so then quit, move out, get a job (or more likely two is what will be required to make ends meet) pay your own way (and try not to get into credit card debt) and go back to school when you are older. I mean what do you want us to tell you? There’s no magical third option beyond go back to school or get a job. You have declared it an impossibility for you to go back to Columbia and your parents won’t be moved so the choice is clear. Thousands and thousands of young people every year don’t go to college or enroll in community college because they have parents who can’t or won’t pay for their school. So they get jobs, and make do, and scrape by somehow. Nothing is stopping you from doing this. Literally nothing.
Actually one thing is stopping you. Deep down, you do care about prestige, but just of a different nature than what your classmates care about. I know this because you fixate on prestigious sounding albeit low paid careers. You know where you could really make an impact? Working as a health care aid in an Alzheimer’s facility, or in a drug rehab center, or cleaning cages in an animal shelter, or some equally unglamorous job that actually helps people. You could just quit, get a Starbucks job, and never go back to college. But instead you want an “acceptable” sounding job in publishing” or “helping the environment.” Ok, so do that, but you know what help the environment needs? Scientists and engineers who grind it out in labs to come up with innovative solutions to huge problems, and smart lawyers and policy makers who grind it out in law school or grad school so they can draft and implement legislation and regulations and lobby to get them passed, and IT folks who grind it out over the weekends to keep the Sierra Club’s network up and running so they can do their business, and HR employee benefits folks, who put in overtime to hire and onboard and pay the employees to do all those things, and fundraising folks who are out at events nights and weekends at events to raise money for the research and advocacy, and the list goes on. Do one of those things, or be a waitress, but don’t you dare sit here and lecture us about being prestige obsessed when your immediate solution to dropping out of Columbia is not to get a degree from your local CalPoly or whatever but rather to hoof it to a blue blood Seven Sisters school. I mean come on.
This. This. 1,000,000x this. Most jobs that truly make a difference aren't anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
Get the darn degree, OP. It will open doors you don't even know about now. Public interest loan forgiveness programs exist for a reason.
-BTDT
OP here. I disagree.
Ivies don't magically open doors for you. There's nothing magical about having Columbia on my resume that will magically net me opportunities if I'm too depressed and tired to really make anything of the opportunities available to me at school. Sure, Ivies open doors that aren't available to grads of other schools -- but that's only if the student really goes after that while they're in college and are a high performing student who takes advantage of the resources Columbia offers. Which I'm not. I'd be better off at a Cal State.
Also, doors can't open if you don't know about them -- you have to be the one to open up the doors yourself. You have to be the one to take advantage of your opportunities and actively work to open these doors, which isn't a possibility if you don't know about these doors or are too depressed to really do anything with them.
There was a study by Dale and Kruger that showed that there is NO difference between students at Ivies and students accepted to Ivies who chose to go to their state school (except for URMs, which I am not). I was completely unsurprised to learn about the study, since going to an Ivy won't magically set up opportunities for the future if the student themselves don't aggressively go after these opportunities.
OP, sorry to say that this does not apply to you as a potential state school (or lower ranked) graduate. You will not have come out at the top of your class from the state school, as many of those kids who were accepted at Ivies but chose to go to state school instead. You have 3 years of grades and drop offs from Columbia that will follow you, and you’ll forever have to explain why you dropped out with 3 semesters left to go. Employers will think you couldn’t handle the pressure at Columbia, or you don’t finish what you start unless you can come up with a solid explanation for why you left. If you say you were miserable because of the people and the culture, and it made you mentally ill — for an employer, that’s a red flag. You have the luxury of staying it out and down the road even your grades won’t matter much but the doors will still open. You are wrong that only the highest achieving kids at Ivies do well. Plenty of middle of the road graduates get the benefit of the doubt when they interview at a company, especially the further out you get from college.
Is it still a red flag if I say that I left because the school took away all of my financial aid? Because that's true as well.
This should be fine, if you say your parents income increased and school dropped your aid. And you are trying to navigate a more sensible economic decision.
NP here, it would absolutely NOT be fine. If someone left an elite school with only 3 semesters left, it marks them as a loser, a quitter, and a lazy worker with no perseverance. Anyone with even a tiny amount of grit would've sucked up the student debt and stayed at the school, since they had already invested so much time and money into it. $80k is NOTHING when you consider that restarting would be much more expensive (both time-wise and financially). Any student with even a small amount of common sense would realize that leaving Columbia five semesters in is equivalent to academic and professional suicide, even if it's because the school dropped all of your financial aid.
+1. There is literally nothing she can say to explain away dropping out of Columbia. I had a classmate at HYP diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and he finished out the degree. OP, if you don’t finish your whole life is a red flag. Nothing you’d do would make up for it. And it’s unlikely you’re going to marry well because frankly, you’re annoying and also depressed (and not already dating someone).
You have to finish or your life is going to be hell.
I hope this is not the advice you would give your own child. Very harsh and pessimistic.
There are many exit and on ramps in life
No, I wouldn’t give my own child this advice unless she was in similar circumstances. For my own kids, they don’t need to prestige chase. But they are being raised to know it’s just important to work hard and be kind rather than focusing on results.
We can afford to do this because of the multimillion dollar trust funds we’ve prepared in their names. That is not OP’s reality - my parents were worse than OP’s, which is why I made so much money.
Anonymous wrote:OP - get mentally strong and then make the decision that is best for you. It will be fine.
Believe in yourself and focus on being happy.
Life is not linear for most people. Just because you had a big setback does not mean your life is over.
Things have a way of working out. Be optimistic and find supportive and kind friends
Things do NOT have a way of working out. If OP drops out of Columbia, the rest of her life will be a living hell. It will be awful beyond repair. Please do not spread BS like "it will all work out" when OP is about to make a life-threatening AWFUL decision.
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