(From your comment to this:) "It took me an entire extra year just to get one class I needed to graduate"
Yeah, from what I've read, a lot of state schools are much less of a bargain than they appear because they simply don't care if you can really graduate in 4 years. The private school I went to would move heaven and earth to make this possible, deal with unexpected overflows in majors (you could pick any and change to any as you wished), etc., which is one of the things you pay the big bucks for.
I have something akin: gross parental betrayal I didn't cotton onto soon enough, resulting in my fruitlessly mostly wasting a decade trying to get the necessary undergraduate science degree, which includes useful recommendations for graduate school, i.e. lower tier schools aren't good for this, for the career I'd prepared for starting in 1st grade. Programming and system administration were just things I was good at, but I didn't truly dedicate myself to programming until all that drama was over, with a huge opportunity cost. Never tried to learn a lot of more pure CS when that would have been a possibility, then again I started seriously studying software engineering in high school.
Also thinking I had plenty of time to work things out; turns out I have a genetic disability that permanently took me out of the work force in my early-mid '40s (picking a date is hard because it started when I was 37 and I turned 41 when the dot-com crash made finding employment very hard).
I.e. make the most of the here and now without foreclosing on the future (as I've seen others now regret).
Yeah, from what I've read, a lot of state schools are much less of a bargain than they appear because they simply don't care if you can really graduate in 4 years. The private school I went to would move heaven and earth to make this possible, deal with unexpected overflows in majors (you could pick any and change to any as you wished), etc., which is one of the things you pay the big bucks for.
I have something akin: gross parental betrayal I didn't cotton onto soon enough, resulting in my fruitlessly mostly wasting a decade trying to get the necessary undergraduate science degree, which includes useful recommendations for graduate school, i.e. lower tier schools aren't good for this, for the career I'd prepared for starting in 1st grade. Programming and system administration were just things I was good at, but I didn't truly dedicate myself to programming until all that drama was over, with a huge opportunity cost. Never tried to learn a lot of more pure CS when that would have been a possibility, then again I started seriously studying software engineering in high school.
Also thinking I had plenty of time to work things out; turns out I have a genetic disability that permanently took me out of the work force in my early-mid '40s (picking a date is hard because it started when I was 37 and I turned 41 when the dot-com crash made finding employment very hard).
I.e. make the most of the here and now without foreclosing on the future (as I've seen others now regret).