From (Temporary) College Failout and Beyond

This month in the United States, the class of 2025 graduates from college. As a member of the class of 2015, this year marks ten years since I graduated from college. While I’ve been fortunate in life to have had some success, my journey to get to where I am today has been anything but smooth. While people’s success stories are quite often talked about, I wanted to write this with the opposite approach: to share one of my most embarrassing failures. There’s a certain stigma around sharing failures. We all want to appear intelligent, experienced, and valuable online. However, I feel sharing failure stories can be equally as valuable as sharing success stories to show others that you can recover from major failures, as well as potentially helping anyone going through a failure as they are reading this. This is my story.

My Freshmen Year

In August of 2011, I entered Syracuse University as a 19 year old freshmen. Even relative to most other 18 and 19 year olds, I was very immature. I was at a place in life where I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, let alone how I wanted my life to be lived. When I entered college, I had no idea whether I wanted to go down a route of sports, business, or technology. I also really just didn’t care. All I wanted to was to have fun and be around people that I cared about, and I figured that everything else would sort itself out.

My freshmen year of college, I had the time of my life. I met so many friends and prioritized personal relationship above all else. Going to class was a complete after thought to me. I didn’t really like any of my classes besides calculus and physics, and I intentionally skipped 25–50% of my classes. Some days, I even skipped class on the days of tests, and I just thought that everything would work itself out. My GPA my freshmen year was the following:

- Semester 1: 1.9 GPA
- Semester 2: 0.67 GPA

Trust me when I say that getting a GPA as low as a 0.67 is hard to do. Ironically, the only course I passed my second semester was my physics lab, probably my hardest course of that semester, because it was the only one I enjoyed going to.

As I was packing my bags up to go home for the summer after my freshmen year, my advisor called me to inform me I was going to be put on academic probation, which meant I was not going to be allowed to attend Syracuse University the next semester. This caught me completely off guard because this possibility never even crossed my mind. I cared so little about going to class and my grades, I had never even read what the ramifications were of getting bad grades in school and was incredibly upset. Worst of all, my parents were incredibly disappointed in me. I was put on academic probation and my terms for returning were:

- Attend a community college for a semester
- Get no lower than a “B” in any class
- Take at least 12 credits in the following semester

Getting Kicked out of College

I came home for the summer not only disappointed in myself, but also home to extremely disappointed parents. While some of my friends got “prestigious internships”, there wasn’t an employer in the world who would hire the college fail out. That summer, I picked up 2 jobs: delivering telephone books in the middle of the summer heat and selling kitchen knives door to door. It might be hard to believe that someone who writes code for a living today also once held a sales job, but it’s true. It’s what I had to do to make money for the summer. While I was actually half decent at selling kitchen knives, during one of my appointments, one of my potential customers said, “Why don’t you cut the shit and come work for me in my IT department for the summer?” I was quite excited about the opportunity. While the internship was anything but glamorous, I got an internship doing IT and Networking support at a property management company. I was a first responder to any employee who had issues dealing with their printer, their mouse, but also fixing and setting up new networks for new apartment buildings the company bought. Even though this experience didn’t look the best on paper compared to some of my friends who were working at big companies, the experience was incredibly valuable as I was directly on the front lines dealing with customers and learned a ton. It was still the most valuable internship I ever had in college, and I am still incredibly grateful for the opportunity they gave me. It really is where I learned that a career in technology was what I wanted to do.

As the summer ended, it was time for me to figure out where I was going to go to school. I ended up choosing Tompkins Cortland Community College, a community college in the very small farm town of Dryden, NY. I lived in the basement of a very small farm house all by myself. I was woken up nearly every day by the sound of chickens and roosters in the morning, and there were a few horses on the property. It was at this community college where I took my first ever programming class. This class was unique in the sense that the professor actually posted every assignment online for the entire semester on the first day of the class. After doing my first programming assignment, I was absolutely hooked on programming. I was so hooked, I actually finished the entire semester’s worth of work in the first week. After this, I new programming was what I wanted to for the rest of my life. After I finished this course, I also self taught myself PHP at the time. As a college fail out, I wasn’t even sure I would ever get a degree, and thought the only way I might be able to make a living was by staring my own business.

Getting Readmitted Back

With my back against the wall, I worked really hard to ensure I would be readmitted back into college. I finished my semester at a community college with a 3.8 GPA and was readmitted back to Syracuse. Upon being readmitted back, I also:

- Was picked to be a TA of a programming class just one year after failing out
- Ended up graduating with a 3.0 GPA, which was extremely hard to do with a cumulative GPA of a 1.2 after my freshmen year
- Got admitted to a masters program at Syracuse, just a few years after them kicking me out
- Won the grand prize of the Syracuse App Challenge, a competition for building the most useful app with the best technology. I used my PHP skills here I self taught myself while ironically being kicked out of Syracuse.

Why Share This?

Nearly 10 years to the day I graduated college, it brings back some rough memories of going through one of the roughest failures of my life. Everyone in life goes through failure. In fact, I would say if you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying hard enough.

I believe sharing failure stories can be useful. As shared, I’ve been in some dark places where it looked like my future was entirely over before it started. However, I think if it wasn’t for my massive failure of being a one time college failout, I would be nowhere close to where I am today, and it was the best learning experience I could have ever asked for.