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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 8608204" data-attributes="member: 6750306">Tried college twice, never panned out.   Organized education and I have never really gotten along and, compounded by a bad school experience and my own mental health issues as a teenager, I was completely burnt out on it by the time I graduated high school. I was one of those kids they used to label "bright but unmotivated" - I rarely paid attention in class, took few notes, barely did any of the reading, wrote reports the night before they were due and never studied for tests, but my high IQ allowed me to still absorb enough information even in the classes I hated to pass them anyway. I never failed a single class - even senior year I was still getting A's and B's in the classes I liked, and mostly getting C's and D's in the ones I didn't. And because I wasn't failing any classes no one noticed I was having problems developing good study habits... If I'd been one of the remedial kids I might have gotten help, but I slipped through the cracks in the educational system - my small-town school system just really didn't have the resources to deal with a smart kid who was bored out of his mind and having social and mental issues.Despite my complete lack of study habits throughout my entire school career, I still managed to graduate high school 150th out of a class of 250...My parents informed me senior year that they had no money to send me to college. My grades weren't good enough, and my family not poor enough, to get any scholarship money other than a $50 scholarship for being left-handed. So I didn't bother looking into any colleges, and signed up to join the Army. Funny story:I'd just about aced the ASVAB, aside from a couple questions about engines, and the recruiter was sure I could get into whatever career track I wanted. Psychology had been one of my favorite subjects in high school, and I was looking to go into Psy Ops.I was about four signatures away from becoming gub'ment property when the recruiter told me he'd call me back in about a week or so after he filed some paperwork. A few days passed after that week, and still no call. I called him a few times but never got any replies to my phone messages.And that was when Iraq invaded Kuwait...  Suddenly my parents somehow had money to send me to college.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" />  A high school friend had actually sent in an application for me to UCONN and I'd been accepted. So I spent three semesters at their Avery Point extension campus. I majored in Psychology but between still dealing with my mental issues, my poor study habits, and the fact that the campus was located out on the water on the absolutely stunning grounds of an old 18th century manor house, I probably spent more time sitting out on the rocks writing poetry than I did attending classes. Even so, I managed to get into some 200's-level courses before just showing up to class wasn't enough for me to keep up my grades, and I was politely asked to get the hell off campus if I was going to keep wasting their time.I worked full-time for about two years, and then during a period of unemployment my parents offered to pay for some college classes again. I went to a local community college as a Liberal Arts major. Between the classes my parents paid for and the couple semesters I paid for on my own, I managed to get about three quarters of the way to a Bachelor's degree before the money ran out again.I'd love to go back and try again, but in the decades since those two tries at college most of the time I've been employed in jobs that don't do much more than pay my bills, and I've had a few stretches of long-term unemployment.So I'm pretty sure that short of winning the lottery there's little chance of a third try.</blockquote>

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