I always wanted to be a "scientist" which translated by my child's brain actually meant engineer. I had also considered Law, Design, and Technical Writing. Still do some of that stuff on the side, in various ways. As I was coming up on college age my parents split and my father was a deadbeat, so community college it was. (I later learned that he was never going to help out with post secondary education and I'd have been out the door on my 18th birthday anyway.)
I ended up taking Electronics Technology and graduated as a technologist. Unfortunately this was around the time when tech was starting to boom (early '80s) and everyone, and his brother was getting into computers as the "way to make it big." The classes were fully 50% larger than previous years, even after adding more. I often felt like I was teaching myself which was OK, because my high school electronics shop teacher had been a Canadian Navy electronics guy. He only started teaching after retiring and had us doing college level work, in grade 12. In first year a friend and I saved maybe half the class from failing a required course, by holding tutoring sessions between classes. The Statics and Dynamics instructor had been elected to cull the herd.
In second year we went through 4 instructors for Basic Electronic Theory, in the fist month and a half, before a new guy was hired. When he started trying to explain to the class how a standard transistor circuit was a non-inverting amplifier, but couldn't make the math work (it's not), I knew that I had to do something; get out. I went to the course coordinator and petitioned for advanced standing. Even said I would take the final exam right then and there. Nope, the best he could do was give me leave to not attend class, except for test dates. I won the only bursary available to the course that year. Third year came and went, and I was in the top 3.
Did I enjoy it? Not really. It was a necessity if I was going to do anything like what I wanted to. The experience soured me a fair bit on standardized education, even if I currently work in a post secondary institution.