Hi Warren, thanks for this comment. I feel for your situation- in my undergrad I jumped between majors and wasn’t sure what skills I wanted to develop, and I was worried that coming from a non-prestigious public college in Canada that there wouldn’t be a place for me in these more competitive roles. This sounds like a cliche, but it was helpful for me at the time: relentlessly focus on what you can control. We don’t choose the cards we’re dealt to start out in life, but you have a remarkable amount of freedom in college to try out projects, explore different options, and get really good at something. College can be your ‘training montage.’
As you identified with the GED, there’s no speed limit. Once you’ve identified a rare and valuable skill that helps solve a pressing problem, you should try to obsessively improve at it. If you haven’t identified that yet, test your fit with small projects that let you try out different skills and interests efficiently, like taking a range of courses, writing something for a personal site, trying a weekend coding project, etc. You’ll want to balance explore/exploit strategies.
The specifics will really depend on your situation. One way to look for your advantage is to ask yourself “which things feel like work for other people, but energize me?” For myself it started with a political philosophy course that I loved (and which introduced me to Peter Singer), but maybe you just haven’t found that spark yet. I’d encourage you not to compare yourself to others who got luckier or are farther along, but to compare to where you’ve been and where you might have been if you didn’t step up. You should be proud of getting your GED and being where you are now.
Also, I don’t think your writing was messy. It seems like you’ve identified a feeling a lot of people have.
Hi Warren, thanks for this comment. I feel for your situation- in my undergrad I jumped between majors and wasn’t sure what skills I wanted to develop, and I was worried that coming from a non-prestigious public college in Canada that there wouldn’t be a place for me in these more competitive roles. This sounds like a cliche, but it was helpful for me at the time: relentlessly focus on what you can control. We don’t choose the cards we’re dealt to start out in life, but you have a remarkable amount of freedom in college to try out projects, explore different options, and get really good at something. College can be your ‘training montage.’
As you identified with the GED, there’s no speed limit. Once you’ve identified a rare and valuable skill that helps solve a pressing problem, you should try to obsessively improve at it. If you haven’t identified that yet, test your fit with small projects that let you try out different skills and interests efficiently, like taking a range of courses, writing something for a personal site, trying a weekend coding project, etc. You’ll want to balance explore/exploit strategies.
The specifics will really depend on your situation. One way to look for your advantage is to ask yourself “which things feel like work for other people, but energize me?” For myself it started with a political philosophy course that I loved (and which introduced me to Peter Singer), but maybe you just haven’t found that spark yet. I’d encourage you not to compare yourself to others who got luckier or are farther along, but to compare to where you’ve been and where you might have been if you didn’t step up. You should be proud of getting your GED and being where you are now.
Also, I don’t think your writing was messy. It seems like you’ve identified a feeling a lot of people have.