Now I will write about my brief time spent attending the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
As you may recall from the “Darron room-mate” entry, I moved to Lexington in 1998 to further my education at UK. I had utterly failed at Asbury in 199X, and had a couple of classes at my hometown’s Community College in the intervening years, but I felt a degree from a big State University would look better on any resume I put forward, so I decided to finish up at UK. Ostensibly I was going for a Computer Science degree, but it would all go horribly awry…
The first few classes in programming were fairly easy. Basic “Hello World!” type stuff – getting text to print on the screen, manipulating simple variables, and the like. At the start I didn’t take any serious math classes. But in the second semester, the homework assignments became dramatically harder. I had to manipulate “linked lists” of numbers and code more complicated databases, and to be honest, without a strong basis in mathematics, developing the algorithms for such operations was pretty much beyond me. I would spend hours poring over my options, and writing programs that were too long and didn’t do what I intended them to do. I was very ill-equipped for such work.
In addition, I started moving into Calculus and more complicated mathematics and I just couldn’t handle it. I remember one class was called Discrete and Combinatorial Mathematics and it just kicked my ass. The professor had a terribly thick accent and a tendency to speak into the whiteboard instead of addressing the classroom, so I couldn’t understand him. And he spoke so fast, ran so quickly over the concepts, and gave them such a cursory treatment, it was impossible to learn anything in that class. I remember they basically arranged it so the T.A. practically gave you the answers to all the homework assignments, and constructed the tests from the exact same problems on those assignments. It was as though they knew that any actual learning was impossible.
With the increase in difficulty, of course my propensity for avoiding all effort manifested, and I started flagging in attendance. I remember I spent days upon days just sitting at home, browsing the Internet, or sleeping. I gave up, similar to how I did at Asbury. I knew I was ruining my chances for a future, but I just didn’t care. Finally I stopped going completely. I think I managed to struggle in there on test days, but I performed horribly. I ended up failing several classes, permanently scarring my educational history.
I eventually thought I could migrate to an English degree, even though I knew it would be useless in the real world, I could probably do good at it and at least have a piece of paper that would say I was employable. But after my crushing defeat at Computer Science, my heart just wasn’t in it, and I didn’t attend those classes either. I also had a bad experience in the couple of writing classes I took: my stories weren’t very compelling and rather sloppily constructed. My professor, who was pretty cool old dude, basically told me I should give up on traditional writing and try to integrate my ability with the Internet in some way. I didn’t return to school the next semester.
Later, in about 200X, I did try to return, but I had to attempt several classes again to correct my failing grades. Once again I did well in the early classes, and even took a refresher course in Algebra to try to correct my lack of exposure, but to be honest it was just one semester to replace multiple Algebra classes in high school and I didn’t really absorb that much of it. I knew I was going to fail abjectly again, and although I managed to force myself through well enough to get A’s and B’s, I stopped attending again in 200X or so.
My final attempt was in 200X. That was the year I got heavily into marijuana and lost all my will to live. I also went crazy. Needless to say, I dropped all my classes again and failed several of them. Having tried three times to make it through college, I completely gave up. I never returned. All in all I accrued about $8000 worth of student loan debt for nothing.
On top of all that, I chose to live off-campus because of my abysmal experience in dorms at Asbury. So, I never got the “College Experience.” No making friends, no bonding over dope and alcohol, no getting laid. As I have told my friends, my interactions with my schoolmates were basically limited to awkwardly silent elevator rides. I saw many attractive young ladies there but never worked up the courage to talk to any of them. I had no particular encouragement from Darron or anybody, which is probably what would have been required to really get into it. He was fully absorbed with Karen at the time, so he didn’t really participate in the “College Experience” either; mostly spending all his free time at home with her.
Now for the actual nostalgia part. The primary thing I remember doing on-campus was sleeping. I would sleep between all of my classes on the cushioned benches the school had in the Classroom Building for Students to sit on. I had a little pager with me from {The Company} that I used as an alarm. I’m sure I disgruntled many of the students looking for a place to sit! But I wasn’t the only one who did it – it was quite common in fact. I was a Night Owl then, so I was perpetually tired during the day, and it worked out well for me.
I also remember working at a Campus Computer Lab once again in order to get part of my Student Aid money. I hoped to “get in good” with the Network Administrators so I could potentially work it into a full-time job, but that never happened. My oddball silence and quirky nature basically prevented me from becoming familiar with them. I mostly just sat by myself, browsing the web. My primary Internet community at that time was video game newsgroups, and I spent many hours posting trolls and flames to them. Sigh, I was a different person then.
Well, I guess that’s about it for my University of Kentucky Experience. Just another string of failures to add to my huge list. With all this failure it’s no wonder I suffer now from “Learned Helplessness,” a condition where people fail so many times they basically stop trying. I’m rather chipper about it now, though. I know I’m a complete loser and, with my age, I’ve become okay with it. Many people couldn’t live in such a situation, but I think my medication keeps me from becoming too depressed about it. Thank whatever deity may exist for that!