One thing I didn't mention yesterday about my degree program. When I first started school I had a plan. A lot of the coping mechanisms for (undiagnosed) ADHD that work in high school don't work at college especially when the size of classes go from 30 people to 600.

At my first school, I constantly ran into barriers that I hadn't experienced in high school. In high school I was encouraged to learn. I had fantastic chemistry, biology, math and computer science teachers. Ms Meyer for example let me go further ahead in chemistry at my own pace

My pre-calc teacher was my computer science teacher and oh all of these high school teachers were women.

I went to a pretty diverse high school as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_High_School_(Virginia_Beach,_Virginia) I was privileged in that many schools don't offer as many AP classes.

My AP chemistry teacher in high school was HARD. She relished in pushing us to understand what was happening, and to write up our experiments thoroughly.

She was also such a fantastic human being. When I asked her about organic chemistry, she made a special class.

So heading into college, I was excited about all the opportunities to learn.

That's not what I got. Instead, everything I had learned was questioned. If I didn't follow the exact processes that the chem teacher showed in class it was failure.

If I didn't understand a question on the computer science exams, I was accused of cheating in the programming lab portion and that I was an idiot.

That professor led me to take a break from school for over a year because I learned he was retiring soon.

I switched majors from chemical engineering with premed to computer engineering because of how much I didn't want to take classes in the chemistry department.

(Sorry this is coming out so disjointed. It was a huge fucking set of chapters in my life that were pretty terrible. I had a lot of family stuff going on as well. Do you know how hard college is for students financially who are trying to get away from terrible abusive families?)

I also had to delay my school at one point because there was no way I was going to get information from anyone about finances and there isn't some path to emancipation at that point. The expectation is that your family is going to support you to some degree.

Oh, and the head of the engineering department encouraging me to change my major from computer engineering to agriculture sciences because there was no way I could cut it as an engineer.

A lot of schools are fucking toxic cesspools of shitty gatekeeping.

So I moved to California in the middle of a bubble and started interviewing. I'd never had a proper tech job, but I had learned a lot about system administration from awesome folks on a BBS called Monochrome.

I also had experience with sun systems because computer labs.

I got 2 offers. One was for a sys admin job and another was for development.

You know another thing that they don't teach you in school? That there is some weird divide in these job opportunities that locks you in to the tiers of ability.

I took the sysadmin job because it was at CALTECH.

That job was magical because I got to meet some of my lifetime friends like @naturedance! I thought there would be opportunities to audit classes, but that didn't actually happen.

To be super super clear. I didn't have a degree at this point.

I started taking community classes at PCC. It was there that I started finding joy in school again. Small class sizes and passionate teachers. No weird dynamics in the classroom.

I moved up to SF, continued getting jobs. At times it was really rough because recruiters often didn't want to work with me because I didn't have a degree and I didn't have sufficient work experience.

I continued taking community college classes.

I took some just for fun, but I had lined myself up to transfer into a state school. When I finally had the appropriate credits, and sent in my application it felt so good to get accepted.

I thought my failures in the first school had forever limited my opportunities.

That state school was a mixed bag. I met some awesome folks, but also some of the classes were huge and troubles I had before I had again. Again (undiagnosed) ADHD coping strategies weren't working.

But a big difference I had was that _I HAD A JOB_. I also had experience.

I had the knowledge and skill to reject what wasn't useful/helpful and was much faster at dropping classes.

I do have to admit that there was one math class that the teacher gave me horrible feels about, so I just showed up for test days. I should have dropped it.

A class where someone can completely avoid the class and get an A on the tests is just a useless gate.

I ended up transferring to yet another school. This time, classes were small. Sometimes too small, but it was awesome.

I completed my degree.

By that point I had over a decade of experience.

I'm SO glad there are other paths into tech now.

I'm sure "not all degree programs" apply here BUT there is a LOT of toxicity in programs and intentional and unintentional gatekeeping.

Requiring degrees? How much of that is just passing on some arbitrary gatekeeping?

I don't know who needs to hear this but here it is.

Your path is valid. Every choice may make the journey harder or easier. You may find yourself facing a gatekeeper at some point. That's not a reflection of you or your worth.

Keep doing what you want to do.