After high school, I went to college. I had absolutely no idea if there was anything I wanted to study. I had no plans for any particular kind of career. There was a major state school close by, and people I knew were going there, so I went there too.
I was a poor student in high school, and had the grades to show it. Luckily I can rock a test. The engineering department of my university gave me a scholarship based solely on my ACT score; it fully covered a year of tuition, then gave me a bit more every year after. Hey, great, I’ll go be an engineer.
One or two of the first-year engineering courses dealt with a lot of programming. I found programming interesting. I found most of the actual engineering parts of engineering boring as hell.
Going from high school to college didn’t suddenly make me a good student. I passed everything my first year, but I didn’t do well enough to keep my scholarship. Since they stopped giving me money, and I preferred programming to the other areas of engineering focus, I switched my major or computer science.
The years went on, and I would do well in the things I found interesting, and terribly in the things I didn’t care about. A healthy mix of As and Fs.
As time went on, I found I cared less and less about any of the courses I was enrolled in. With the power of hindsight, I was obviously suffering from undiagnosed and untreated anxiety and depression. The effect was that my healthy mix turned mostly into Fs. I enrolled in courses, then just sat at home and never went . My last two semesters of school I took 10 classes. I got a B+ in Computer Science III, and nine Fs.
So after four years I was done. I had been a full time student the whole time, and accumulated a total of 84 credits.