My University Experience
Honestly, I felt like I mostly wasted three years of my life. I did not apply to any 'prestigious' universities at all even though I got A*A*A in A-Levels which was really dumb on my part.
Anyways, the first year, I spent absolutely nothing. I didn't even go to class most of the time and I just went to university to sit in the library mainly reading books, a bit of programming and that's about it. I made zero friends in year 1. Granted my life was not going that great at the time, my parents were splitting up, my brother was flunking out of university and that had a huge negative impact on me and I did not respond well to that at all mentally or physically, I spent one too many nights crying myself to sleep and thinking about hurting myself with kitchen knives (I learnt from Frank Underwood in House of Cards that you need to "cut along the tracks not across them. It's a rookie mistake" thank god I never did it though. Instead I just isolated myself inside, did not want to talk to anyone at all. School was boring as hell; the stuff they were teaching was basically 9th grade math, some 'business & economic' terminology. In the summer I tried working at a grocery store, but my mum won't let me. I did ~3-4 days of waking up from 4:00 am taking frozen foods out of a big refrigerator room and stocking it in the store. This experience taught me a few things. 1) I did not want to do manual labor 2) I was blessed that I am in a position to not do this job, because I know some friends who don't have a choice. I also took care of my health for the first time that summer and went to get new glasses. I went from 3.5 to 8!
Second year I started talking to someone over the summer and it motivated me to get better, she's awesome, we've grown apart though that's a long story I'll get to another day. With this renewed sense of life, I tried to talk to people, go to events, made probably 4 'close' friends. At this time was when it hit me in the face that I was completely wrong about the school you go to. When I started applying for internships I just got rejection and rejection, probably over 300+. I had to do 3 unpaid internships in the summer to be able to get a part time role at a startup. It was the first time in my life where I felt like people were judging me not on my skills and ability. It felt like no matter how hard I tried, the school name on my resume held me back. It really made me angry, bitter and spiteful.
Academic rigor was essentially non-existent, just a really poor standard in my opinion. I understand that this is not Harvard, but sometimes I felt really awful. For example I remember taking a quantitative methods module exam and one of the questions was essentially multiplying two numbers or something ridiculous like that (At university level???)
Third year more of the same, I still applied for graduate roles and results were still the same, probably 200+ rejections from June 23 to Aug 24.
I did sell my first 60% of a website I made for $300 I made in total ~ $50 in revenues. I definitely got played, because after a few weeks the guy who bought it was already in talks to sell it to someone for $4-10k. It was my first real business deal and I worked on that thing for fun for like 2 weeks so I don't really care, but this was quite promising and it got me thinking about taking entrepreneurship seriously. This may be a dumb statement, but I felt like if I just needed to do a little more marketing and this site would have been easily worth x10-100 which is a fairly sizeable sum. This gave me some real confidence although I've always struggled with discipline and I didn't build anything else apart from that site until after the May 24 exams. From mid May till today 23 July I've made three new projects which is quite good output to be fair, but have made $0 sales so far. Although I did get a fun twitter roasting bot to 1k+ users in less than 48 hours.
Anyways coming back to university I did well in exams and got 80% average or something like that. Although I do have to say one professor basically just recites the same exam over and over. Like literally the same questions every year. It really pissed me off, because I actually wanted to learn and get challenged from this place and I didn't feel like I did. Anyways after graduation I was glad it was over. I put on the gown and hat and took some nice pictures to send home to my parents. I was just relieved that it was over. Honestly, it felt like a fever dream.
It felt like an opportunity for a new start, a reset almost. For the first time in probably 3 years, I just have a deep feeling of slight optimism that brighter days are ahead and life will get better. I'm still a bit lost on what to actually focus on. I want to create a serious startup and find product market fit and scale so I think that's my number one priority right now, but also should find a way to make some stable money first. Possibly travel to the U.S. or just somewhere that doesn't cost £900 per month for one bedroom.
I think there are a few things I took away from this experience.
- I really need to improve my big life decision making skills, the choice to go to this university was definitely a bad choice and set my earning potential back a lot in my opinion.
- Need to take care of my health.
- Put a whole lot more effort into relationships.
- Have some fucking faith the future will be better.
- Stay hungry, stay foolish.
I hope this was informative and entertaining. Contact me if you have anything you want to share.
Key Takeaways
- •Improve big life decision making skills
- •Take care of health
- •Put more effort into relationships
- •Have faith in a better future
- •Stay hungry, stay foolish
I hope this was informative and entertaining. Contact me if you have anything you want to share.