It's got to be hard to have to say "No, the one in Ohio" for the rest of your life. Maybe that's the root problem?
It's weird to me how this went on for so long. Like why didn't she take a year off after 2 or 3 semesters instead of just letting this drag on so long?
The millennials were supposed to kill Applebee's, but they lack focus so it was only wounded.
It just seems very modern rich kid situation where your parents work hard to get rid of all consequences, not thinking that the consequences are there for a good reason. Academic Suspension was needed here!
Sending a kid to school in Ohio is tough love. It's the consequence of not applying yourself in high school.
8: It looks to me like the family lives in Ohio. Is that right?
8: yes -- https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/10/17/reporting-in-from-trump-country-2020/
Oh, you mean factually and not morally.
It just seems very modern rich kid situation where your parents work hard to get rid of all consequences, not thinking that the consequences are there for a good reason. Academic Suspension was needed here!
I think it's also being too smart for your own good. You can talk your way out of consequences, and also outsmart your own brain with really polished-sounding rationalizations. Like being able to feed your therapist such real-sounding answers that the therapist can't tell that you're not engaging in the process.
But if your honest answer sounds bad, the therapist might hit the electric shock button.
14: You can tell Moby has a lot of experience with therapy.
11: Thanks, NickS! Darke County! That sounds scary even to an Ohioan.
I think it's also being too smart for your own good.
Yes. As she notes in the post, she had 36 credit hours from high school. That's basically entering college as a sophomore.
Life is just hard sometimes. Everyone has to face the question Well what if I just didn't? in some form or fashion. Some of us answer by commenting on blogs; others quip about Ohio.
7: And then 100% it's our fault for not retaining her.
But her case is actually pretty interesting because 'co-morbidity' is usually how stop-outs happen. What if I just didn't do the work? compounded with genuine challenges, and an environment which somehow manages to make it harder with respect to the challenges (it's not like dealing with the disability office is fun) but also never manages to say 'at some point one might try going to class' or 'maybe planning the vacation to Hawaii for two weeks in a seven week semester isn't smart.'
It just seems very modern rich kid situation where your parents work hard to get rid of all consequences, not thinking that the consequences are there for a good reason. Academic Suspension was needed here!
She clearly had a lot more security than most, and I'd believe that a system that gave everybody as much leeway as she had would produce predictable problems. But was it bad for her? I don't know.
One of the things about being a smart, struggling kid is that if you say, "I know I'm screwing up, I think I can fix it, give me another chance." It might work.
I'm not arguing against another chance, but you should take some time off before that second chance! Which is exactly why the whole Academic Suspension thing is built in.
This is going to sound judgy and I don't mean it that way, just as a sense of what went wrong. But she sounds as if she was in college pretty purely to check off the "get a degree" box -- she doesn't mention being actively interested in the content of any of her classes, or of thinking that the subject matter of a particular class was going to be any use to her. I wonder if she'd do better, when she goes back, deliberately choosing classes with a strong eye to "would I go listen to someone talking about whatever this is for fun?" God knows I never had either an academic work ethic or any sense -- i faked my way through college because most of my classes were at least mildly valid as entertainment.
22: Yes, through the whole sad account, I was wanting to grab her by the shoulders and ask "What do you want to do with your life?" which is kind of silly, since I've never been able to answer that question for myself.
22/23 My parents both went to Antioch during the time that the first year program was, essentially, "do whatever you want, we'll give you credit for it." Which they thought was an effective way to grab students by the shoulders and force them to think, "do I really want to spend this much money to sit around playing cards, or do I want to take advantage of the education." But it was controversial and created problems.
This looks potentially interesting, but I don't have access: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40160860
Further to my prior comment: I think there's a certain drive to be sensible or practical about ones undergraduate education that's a little misguided. We live in a fucked-up world where pretty much any middle-class job requires a bachelors degree, but lots of them don't actually need anything you need to have learned in college. For a whole lot of life tracks, you really do need to just have the rubber stamp saying you showed up.
At which point, if you want to spend four years doing a media studies degree where you only talk about comic books, or whatever else sounds frivolous but you'd enjoy, I think that's as practical as anything else.
I've known a fair few people besides myself* who drifted or bounced from job to job for 10-15 years after college before figuring out what they were going to do (desperation of the "I've used up 8 of my 9 lives" has a way of doing that), and also some who blazed through college and right into the careers they knew they always wanted and were successful at them. And none of the former to my knowledge ever had a midlife crisis (luxury they/we can't afford) versus the latter group where there have been quite a few.
* Checkered college career, took 6 years including one summer school, numerous As but also multiple Fs and the like. 10 years later went back for a masters and ultimately got a doctorate at age 41. At which points it was all "needs must ..."
Adding to 26, Heebie's "This is what it looks like to grapple with life from a position of security" is exactly on point for me and the group I'm talking about.
The tricky thing is that 25 (no one cares about the classes or majors) is more true the fancier your school is, and has becoming less true each year as no-nothing HR people take over more and more hiring processes.
You should major in history instead of comic books. The stories are almost as ridiculous and it looks better.
The only downside is the art is not very good in history texts.
25,28: In the long run, I think even at less fancy places having the degree matters more than its specific content, though the specific content matters more for getting your foot in the door past HR. But I don't think she'd be well-served by just finishing any old degree -- it sounds to me like she was taking classes that sounded like they'd be interesting, and then she just didn't go.
Unfoggedtarian's "very modern rich kid situation" is quite to the point. But I'd say that this fits in very well with what people mean by the power of "intergenerational wealth transfer": the cushion that rich children (and to a lesser extent, many white children) have, by virtue of winning the birth lottery. Sure, I look at her story and think to myself "ain't no way I could have pulled that shit off" but then again, I knew from the jump as an immigrant that it was sink or swim, no middle ground.
But she's not an immigrant: she's a birthright American. And part of that birthright, is to not get things right the first time, yet not drown as a result. I look at her story, and my thought isn't "rich kid, geez" but rather "why doesn't every poor Black kid get this? We're a rich enough country to afford it."
[ugh, posted too soon]
I remember reading a couple of stories over the years about this very subject. It discussed how what sets apart Black (and poor) children from white children, is specifically that when a white child fucks up, their parents can help them back to their feet in manifold ways, whereas, when a Black child fucks up, their parents often don't have the wealth cushion to help that child get back on track.
I don't remember where I read it, sigh.
My brother had a lucrative side gig in high school, went to college and found a wife, got a masters, and for a career did the same thing he'd done in high school only full time. I think he kept it up on the side while in undergrad/grad school too.
No Moby, he's not a prostitute.
Everybody post your SAT scores, salary and how you squandered your twenties.
It's not prostitution if you say "suggested donation" instead of a fixed fee.
I got the idea from an art museum.
Which got the idea from a prostitute with very honest clients.
chill: No, I squandered my 20s. I did a PhD in computer science and a postdoc (4.5yr of it, sigh). Then flamed out of academia, stared at a wall for a couple of months, and then picked myself up, got a job in industry, and spent my 30s working my ass off to recover. It wasn't fun, but I got lucky b/c the Internet boom was just starting (1995). Getting that PhD (in CS no less) was the worst decision of my career, only followed in a close second place by doing those postdocs.
If only I'd squandered my 20s having a really good time .... it would have had precisely the same effect on my career. Ah, well.
If your worst decisions in life resulted in you being a computer scientist in the mid 90s, then I think those really aren't comparable to other people's bad decisions that had objectively bad outcomes like being imprisoned, stuck in low wage employment, addicted to something, having to be a single parent, etc.
4: yes. the opinionated academic's institution makes all kinds of complicated heroic-medicine interventions to keep 'em flying when it's blindingly obvious some of them need to....stop. draw a line, go away and think about it. even...fail and own the fact they fucked up. but instead they have these people who've been on the books in some sense for six years clocking up more and more student loan money, making no progress, generating incredibly disproportionate amounts of administrative cleaning for someone else. I seriously think it would be healthy to write off the money, forget about it.
42: Right. And your parents can tell people you're a piano player in a brothel to avoid the shame of having raised a graduate student.
Everyone has to face the question Well what if I just didn't? in some form or fashion. Some of us answer by commenting on blogs
I was wondering who was going to say something along the lines of "she really sounds like one of us"...
32: It's not just even birthright American. If I'd failed out my first year of college because I didn't want to go to class, the result would not have been my dad giving me a paid internship and platform with a giant audience so that I could spin flunking college into (probably) a book contract. I mean, good for her? It's better than most alternatives. But this is unusual amounts of soft-landing-a-screw-up even for most middle class Americans.
Yeet the Rich: Uh, it seems you took my comment in the opposite sense of what was meant.
chill asked "how you squandered your twenties". So I answered, in a manner that, I thought, demonstrated that in fact, the real squandering was that I spent my twenties working my ass off instead of having a good time, and *still* had to do all the recovering anyway. Literally, I lived 3yr in Paris on postdoctoral fellowships, and spent that time working so goddamn hard that I took *one* trip for pleasure in the entire time. I *could* have spent that time traveling all over Europe. And if I'd known I'd be ejected from academia anyway, that would have been the obvious move.
Nowhere in that was there a "compare the cross you bear to that borne by others."
46 is correct, though I'd be a little surprised if this turned into a book contract for her.
Speaking for myself as someone prone to procrastination and not doing shit if left alone, going off to write a book seems much more likely to result in nothing getting done than writing a paper for a class.
Cala: "But this is unusual amounts of soft-landing-a-screw-up even for most middle class Americans."
It's true that this scion-of-Scalzi has a pretty cushy ride, that you don't see among the middle class: after all, Scalzi's rich. OTOH, I've heard a number of stories from younger relatives who grew up back in East Incest, TX, about their school friends and their fuckup ways, subsidized by their parents. And about the decidedly not-upper-middle-class retired friends of older relatives, who subsidize their wastrel children's lives.
I couldn't find the article I'd read a while back, but here's one from the Center for American Progress: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2021/03/19/497377/eliminating-black-white-wealth-gap-generational-challenge/
Here's one tying this to the Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/stories/black-wealth-transfer-and-confronting-the-racial-wealth-gap/
When your parents are poor, they can't subsidize your moving to a new city to get a new job; they can't subsidize you taking some community college classes to get a certification, etc, etc, etc.
24: Purchase the article (which does look interesting) for a mere $49. Jfc and roflmao.
47: Fair enough. I suppose I was reacting to the "worst decision of my career" framing, after the OP and thread had gotten me thinking about some of my own worst decisions and those of others.
I haven't read the article, but one of the scary things about taking time off (unless you just take time off to work in a restaurant or as a temp) is that you have to start paying back your loans. Pre-ACA you had to be in school to be on your parents health plan. I remember reading an article about someone who was really sick and took incomplete in all of her classes at UNH, because enrolling was the only way to get health insurance. No individual level solution. (Staying on your parents insurance is only as good as the insurance your parents have.), but I think even motivated students might benefit from taking a semester off to volunteer at something and work enough to fund travel and then come back with a better focus but some don't because the loans would come due.
53: That's because it's crickets and therefore cheep instead.
Darke County sounds like a Hulu Original.
Wow, tough crowd. I have a bright, capable, narcoleptic son a couple of years older than Athena Scalzi, and while the details of his college experience are different and less dire than hers has been so far, her post resonates a lot. Narcolepsy is hard, the interaction of narcolepsy and mental health is hard, and I'm glad that I, like Scalzi, am in a position to give my kid room to sort out his challenges and find a path forward.
Thanks. I found it generally sympathetic as well.
As a note, I have the impression that the pattern of, "bright, capable, struggling the the structure of school" is more common among boys than girls (I somewhat fit that pattern myself, and it was definitely true for many of my friends), and I appreciated that Athena's story was from a female perspective.
My kid got all Fs and a D his first semester in college. He did better after that, and he had some issues with depression and anxiety and being trans, but yeah, it was rough. He's doing better now, but we couldn't manage the trick of having his first years grades erased, and having a GPA of 3.2 isn't really splendid if you're hoping for grad school, which he is.
I got into two top doctoral programs in my field despite a cumulative GPA of 2.8 in college. I did a master's program beforehand, not just to "repair" (lol) the GPA but to repair the obvious deficits in my learning and accomplishment that were accurately reflected by the low GPA. On the one hand, it was great and I have no regrets. On the other hand, even a few years later the master's program tuition (minor public uni) increased to no-way-in-hell numbers, and I imagine exceptions to that rule nowadays are few. (This was all within the past 20 years, not the 1970s or anything, which makes the increases seem even more shocking.)
Wow, tough crowd.
Yeah, I should have been more explicitly empathetic in 45. I've now been struggling with "what if I just don't?"/akrasia for about 35 years now, and it's really, really awful (and I don't have the narcolepsy comorbidity). As we speak, I'm putting off finishing a barely-started bachelor's half-thesis, whose twice-extended deadline is today; I have another barely-started half-thesis due in 4 days; and a portfolio for a pedagogy class is about 3 months overdue and may be really, truly too (in which case I will have to repeat both it and a sequel class, whose work I actually handed in). I'm now 40, failing at my transition to a 3rd career after failing to launch in the first two, but nevertheless enjoying an incredibly good life thanks to a wife whose vacations I consistently ruin due to always "needing to work" (but never working).
I truly wish the best for Athena. It sounds like the time away was good for her.
I think 61 is really on point. Erasing grades is good, but resetting the clock to academic suspension is bad. If you have multiple semesters of problems you need to step away and come up with a new plan and get yourself out of the trap of just doing the same thing every semester. MIT famously has pass/no credit grading for 1st year students. My best friend growing up had one semester where he just failed all his classes and I know it was a very difficult road back to graduating. But my sympathy wanes a bit when this is like 4 semesters and not 1.
(Also 19 is a key part of the backstory, there's just huge pressure right now from administrations on faculty to never ever ever fail anyone no matter if they come to class or not, and it's really frustrating.)