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[Bauglir]

I can answer at least one question. The teachers who actually cared enough to try and console you with college were, very likely, the brighter and/or more motivated students when they were going through the process of becoming teachers in the first place. Likely, then, they felt a similar sense of isolation from the people who were supposed to be their peers - in high school. In college, you do tend to encounter people who're more motivated and clever, particularly in the upper classes related to whatever it is you're pursuing, so they were telling you what solved their problem, believing it to be the same as yours.

The problem is, it wasn't the same problem. It's not the environment, so much as it's how you're allowed to deal with it (I think?), and that doesn't change at all as long as you're in academia, as far as I know. Maybe being a professor allows something more flexible, but I don't know. Publication deadlines sound like they're no better.

But... not the point, I guess. I will say that, as far as compromises go, a job (as opposed to a "career") will do better at getting you what you want. It'll be a while before all the baggage that typically goes with new employment (policy reading, learning new scheduling assumptions, and so on) gets out of the way but once that's done you're pretty much doing the same routine as living in an off-campus apartment, except your homework is due once a month or so and usually consists of spending one or two hours making sure you've got all your bill-paying bases covered (which you're already doing, IIRC). In my experience thus far. You might not have a solid 8 hour chunk, what with all the maintenance overhead that goes with living, but if you've got the energy left then a 4 to 6 hour chunk isn't unreasonable, plus weekends or equivalent days off.

Since getting a job for a little while is what you're planning on doing, I'm just saying it sounds like it's a solid plan.

[MaximumZero]

I'm... 5'3" and look even smaller (about 4'11", apparently, though I don't know why).  Believe it.

I'm 5'1" tall, and according to a bunch of my friends who are all over 6', I look much larger/taller than my little brother. He's actually 5'3".

[Vector]

Yes.

People used to tell me that college is packed with people just as smart and engaged as I am, and the reason why I'm not happy is because I'm just not trying hard enough to ~use my resources~.  This is false.  The traditional academic model isn't working, I'm still doing busy-work even in the math department, and even though there are some students here who definitely are as bright as I am, they're few and far between and most of them simply don't have the same range (and many of them still don't have the same sorts of flashes of insight I do.  They're well-trained, they're brilliantly smart, but they aren't flexible).

I feel like I've been trying to get that rant out my entire life, and the thing is, I'm not trying to say that I'm "special" so much as that I'm being run ragged with all the assumptions society makes as to what works and what doesn't work.  People always say that the problem is me, something I've caused, a behavior that is somehow pathological.  It isn't.  I've just to find my own way of navigating the world, rather than somehow trying to recast myself in their image.

[MaximumZero]

Unabashedly, I have to say that I'm envious. I seem to be the exact opposite of you. I'm not particularly talented at anything practical. Sure, martial arts is cool, but I'll never make a career out of it. Sure, I'm pretty good with English, but...it's my native language. I have no excuse not to be. I can fix your average user's computer, but I'm a total hack when it comes to high level stuff, like programming. I probably couldn't design a logic gate with the instructions in front of me. Imaginary numbers make my head hurt. Sure, I'm a little smarter, more cultured, what have you than your average facebook junkie Jersey Shore fan. At the very least, I'm good at looking like it, at any rate. However, when I take a step back and look at myself, I'm a lot dumber most of my peers. Every teacher I've ever had has said that I have "tons of potential". Even now, "tons of potential". It's just...so far out of reach, you know?

I don't know where I was going with that, other than contemplating my navel, but it feels good to get off my chest.

[Realmfighter]

On the "Tons of Potential" thing I still have no idea if that's just something teachers say as an offhand comment to make the kids not feel bad about themselves or if it actually means something.

[Duke 2.0]

On the "Tons of Potential" thing I still have no idea if that's just something teachers say as an offhand comment to make the kids not feel bad about themselves or if it actually means something.

I try not to think about this too much. No way to be sure, and the paranoia isn't welcome when I'm already doubting what few talents I have.

[MaximumZero]

I'm gonna take it at face value. No one should worry about hurting a 28 year old's self esteem. If I can't take it at this point, something's wrong. Hell, if I were a pro athlete, I'd have been pushed out of sports at my age for not living up to my potential. Possibly for a few years now.

[Bauglir]

I know some semblance of the feeling, at least. I've always worked extremely differently from those around me. People talk about studying for hours and hours each night, avoiding cramming, but in retrospect, that's never worked for me. The only "studying" I've ever done is busywork, and that's only been helpful where there's bits of routine that they never taught us to really understand on a deep level (because doing so would be an entire high-level course, and we've got one week to cover it, so they just give you the end result to use as a tool). I hated doing that so much, I just couldn't force myself to keep plowing through it for more than 20 or 30 minutes. It's responsible for a lot of the grades I could've got but never did. I mean, flash cards? Fuck, no. Stuff like that hurts, on some level.

When dealing with stuff that I actually had a chance of understanding, though. Totally different. I didn't have to spend hours going over it, because hearing the lecture, looking at the data, playing with the concepts in my head... I'd get it the first time around, basically. When I didn't, repetition didn't help, I had to come from a different angle or I'd just hit a brick wall. I didn't just have to memorize a fact, I could fit something into a web of thought that let me build up the answers I'd need later on, on the fly. If that makes sense. It's hard to put into words, but it's the difference between "Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 m/s/s" and the Law of Gravitation. Even in classes that are usually thought of as mostly memorization (anatomy, history, etc) anything where I could go, "Oh, of course, that makes sense..." before a piece of information was helpful because it made it part of the flow.

So this ended up with me getting As in the classes that fit how I learned, Bs where I didn't and the material was easy, and Cs where I didn't and the material was hard and all I could do was try to brute force my way through it (and the only reason it ever, ever worked because it was hard and everyone else had a tough time; Calc 2 and Organic Chemistry were both curved). Not because I was particularly good at memorizing stuff, I was just good at picking out what I'd need to generate answers later. I'm not particularly smart, and I have shit for work ethic, but I'd still get people asking me for help studying in those A classes, but it's got nothing to do with my method. My studying technique was "Eat a lot, sleep a lot, show up for class, skim the provided lecture notes once before the exam".

I don't really know where I'm going with this. I actually typed up another paragraph, but it ended up being a repetition of what I said before. So I guess I'll just say that I've felt boxed in by assumptions about what I was really like, even if those assumptions come out as praise. If people say that I'm especially smart, I just think they have a different definition of what "smart" means.

...

Good lord, this post is pretty egotistical, isn't it? Oh well, too tired not to click post. HOORAY FOR EARLY MORNING HUBRIS

[Aqizzar]

On my drive home, I was planning to write up a probably one-to-two thousand word story of my experience today, going to an employment-counseling agency (i.e. where I pay them to find me a job, as opposed to "recruiters" where a company pays them to find me).  It was going to be a dense and dire psychological novella, going through all my paranoid states of mind while talking to a guy forty years older than me about how hard it is to find a job when I believe I'm not really qualified for anything, since logically if I was I wouldn't be there.  I kept telling myself to save it for home, because writing it down would at least help me clear my head and stop bouncing off the walls.

But the more I thought about it, the more it brought me back to an idea I had a few months ago, and subsequently abandoned.  It now feels more possible than ever.  This might ultimately count as inspiring, but it certainly puts a pit in my stomach to think about, namely because of the paths my life went down to bring me to it.  And I think if anyone's going to comment on it, the general Sadness Dump Thread is probably the right place.

I am going to write a book.  An informal informational book, full of both statistics and tales.  It's going to be the seminal examination of my American generation, as seen from within itself.  On the crippling ennui of being an over-educated under-employed cynical suburbanite of the 21st century.  And specifically, about the crushing depression of essentially begging for "employment", and by extension a sense of purpose and value, under the accusatory weight of cultural expectation, in these past couple years and the near future.

It's going to be acerbic, literally dripping with wry ire, and it will take all of my skills to keep it focused, and to complete it.  I may, nay will, need this forum's help in completing it, because you guys are what I have to turn to for a project like this.  Because I certainly get the feeling that, if you're hanging around here enough to give half a rat's ass about anything people talk about in this thread of all threads, then you are already my target audience.  Because fuck knows Speaking Truth To Power is a fool's game, and if anyone outside of the book's subject so much as thumbs through a copy, it would be a happy side-effect at best.  And because incredibly verbose validation, and just having a respectable platform to speak on my own behalf, is the ultimate goal.

Spoiler: My outline, God help me. (click to show/hide)

How Did It Come To This - A personal episode from my own life, to set the stage.

The Trophies Were Not The Problem - Examining growing up in thirty years of stagnant wages, declining standards, raising expectations, erstwhile encouragement, and the true arrival of global economics.

What The Heck Does Baccalaureate Mean Anyway? - How "Robin Hood" funding, the Presidential Fitness Test, the denigration of teaching, and the two-tier standard of achievement destroyed public schooling.

The Sheepskin Boom - "By the time you graduate, a college degree will be as important as a high school diploma was for my generation. Good thing we can afford it." - AKA, the entrapment of a generation.

Mark Zuckerburg Can Kiss My Butt - Anecdotes are not standards, and how Golden Tickets and the myth of entrepreneurship turned America into a nation of self-righteous Jewish Tigermoms.

Unemployed Need Not Apply - The grand paradox of being both under and over qualified for entry-level drudgery, and the confluence of high unemployment, skills mismatch, and a glut of useless education.

"Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty", circa 1964 - This generation does share the blame for its difficulties.  The greatest crime - not asking if what we were being told to do made any sense, when we briefly had the chance before the economy imploded (and why we're off the hook for that one).

The Right To Complain - Occupy Wall Street vs Tahrir Square.  What do whitebread 'millennials' know about hardship anyway?  Answer: We were promised better.

DIY Panopticon - The most terrible prison man can construct is his own mind.  Self-worth, a national pride in blaming the victim, onset depression, addiction to bitterness, and how we come to love and hate our cages.

Finally, The Answer - Take your pick: The hollow one ("You, now go out and be somebody"), or the mean one ("Call me when you find it, so I can write a sequel").

[Scaraban]

Aqizzar, I won't claim to know you or anyone else on this forum as well as I probably should for how much of my life has already been spent here, but from what I've seen you seem like a really cool guy. I wish you the best in this endeavor, and if you need a lazy sarcastic asshole's take on your drafts I'll be happy to read through. You can count on my purchase when you finish.

[Max White]

Yea, as far as pretty cool guys go, I'm some what sure Aqizzar is one of them.
As an ignorant foreigner, I'm not sure I'm exactly the ideal target market, but still, an interesting endeavour. I look forward to reading it, and seeing where it goes.

[JoshuaFH]

I would absolutely love to read a work by yourself, Aqizzar. You always had a way of expressing the feelings I never knew I had, in the most sincere way possible.

[GlyphGryph]

I would totally buy that book in a hearbeat.

Kickstarter? Heheh.

I'd be willing to drop a hundred+ or so in the pot if you do.

[Aqizzar]

I guess I've kinda painted myself into a corner on this one.  Well shit.  Now I really do have to do it, and it'll feel like work.

Whatever, suck it up Aq.  I'm doing it.  I don't know how long it'll take me, I can make no promises, but I swear to God I'm to write something.  I've written pieces in short times, I wrote seven thousand words that I wanted to in less than two weeks, when I planned for half that and didn't have to take the time to explain anything.  I can write a book.  I can write the fuck out of a book.  If every one of those bulletpoints up there was a research paper, that'd be like 45,000 words easy, and I know I'd break that.

I guess if I want it to be based in anything other than personal anecdotes, I will have to do some actual work.  Damn.

[ChairmanPoo]

Yeah, life doesn't get easier after uni. It does feel safer to have the degree already, though