I've done it, and I'm more relieved than I should be. I'm now a dropout. It's not one of those fuzzy, do-you-consider-yourself statuses; it's pretty set-in-stone and well-defined. And now I'm in that category. Of course, it's a loaded term; you're not just a dropout, you're a Dropout - enjoy the show and the connotations, the emergency exits are to the rear.

I did it this week. We're a couple of months into the semester, but I don't see it as wasted effort - I'll get to this in a moment.

Reasons

Now why would I do that? I don't pretend to be a rational creature, and maybe if I were I would have taken a different course, but I do think that my actions can be backed up rationally.

Little To Gain

The main reason, the overriding reason, is that I have little to gain from college. Everything that I have accomplished - everything I am proud of - I have done on my own. This would continue to be the case with or without a degree, with a major difference being that I now have more time to devote to things that I find interesting.

A degree is a piece of paper. The fact that you have one indicates something about you to potential employers. For some people, it shows that they're willing and able to put in years of determined effort to accomplish a goal. For some, it just shows that you have a knack for cramming that let you squeak by your classes.

For me - and excuse my vanity for considering that to be of the utmost importance in this situation - it would indicate that I was willing to spend four years towards getting a piece of paper that pays testament to... well, to my willingness to spend four years getting it. That's what it would mean to me, and anything else that I could say about it must follow from that.

But those things that do follow from this don't tend to be positive things. So, a degree couldn't be something I would consider to reflect positively on me, and that's a major factor in my decision.

Excitement

A lot of people seem excited when they talk about college. With bated breath they'll tell you about their plans, if they've found a roommate, the crazy course load they'll have in the first semester, and so on. For reasons I don't understand, I don't feel this same excitement. Sorry, I just don't, and that gave me pause as to whether I was really expecting the same thing as everyone else.

Fear

Now that I've decided to move forward without a degree, I do have to admit that I'm scared that I've made a mistake. This is, perhaps, the single legit reason I had for staying in school: fear that, should I not, I would someday regret it. But in my admittedly limited experience, taking the cautious route has always ended up being the thing I regretted. At this point in my life, continuing a formal education is the cautious route, the default, and that simply isn't a good enough reason to follow through with it.

Closing Doors

In some ways, I already had life figured out; I would get a degree, a job, a life, and, well, live, and then I'd die, and that would be that, and that would be me. Which makes it, to my mind, something of a solved problem. I already knew the gist of how everything would work out; only the mere 'implementation details' of how my life actually worked out was left to be determined.

Which would be entirely too boring. There's no reason for me not to be on my toes now and then. There's no reason for anyone my age to feel sure of their future; what's the point of youth, of the terrifying sensation of being able to alter your future, if you're merely going to guide yourself into what you'd always assumed you would have all along?

So this is one way of making sure I don't do this, making sure that I don't take anything for granted - education, life, whatever.

Alternatives

My parents, none too happy when I brought this up perennially, would always ask (edge-in-voice) when I planned to get a full-time job. In their minds, the progression was simple: School, Job, Retirement. I don't see it that way. Work is not a virtue. My expenses are low, and I'm quite happy to sit around reading (or hacking OSS projects) in the extra hours I have after I pay the bills.

Instead

This obviously opens up some time, and I know I could allow myself to whittle it away uselessly. I'd like to avoid that. I've started reading a bunch of new books recently, some technical, some not. I'd also like to put my technical efforts into developing a suite of personal-development centered web applications. I also plan to recommit to finishing The * Schemer books and SICP, and to understanding enough of Lisp to understand the limits of usefulness of syntactic abstraction - Lisp's 'special' feature, but also, I think, not as singularly important as I once thought it was.

Idle Hands

That also means I'll be posting here more regularly, if for no other reason than to keep a record for myself of my progress.

Future

I'm not averse to changing my mind in the future; in particular, getting a traditional liberal arts degree (Philosophy and Sociology are candidates) is something I think I might enjoy. But it's not something I consider urgent, and, in fact, I think I might be better suited for it in, perhaps, a decade, when I'm older and more patient. Most importantly for the moment, I'm no longer considering myself in active pursuit of a Bachelor's degree; perhaps 60% of my life remains untouched and unchanged despite this. I think I can improve upon the rest.

That's all for now; I am working to redo this blog using a CouchDB backend, which will hopefully be done (although not live) today.