Academia fucked me hard. I used to score full marks in schoolwork, always answered most of the questions in class, and made an effort to read as voraciously as I could. For some reason, I always drastically underperformed in exams. After that dreaded year where all the colleges who seemed to fight over my applications, withdrew their offers in rapid succession, I was lost for a while, and went straight to work.

I learned that there still are plenty of chances to grow outside of education. All my coworkers always came back from weekends or trips with a lot to tell. Most of them were older than 40. It's just that some people - many who come here no doubt - are ignored.

Having the life of a student wasn't everything. I'd been gaining a lot of industry experience as a technician, and could do my own thing in my free time. Every few months some graduate intern would show up, and when time rolled around for them to dabble in my department, I was their instructor. The task made me bitter.

These graduates were gormless, vapid, lacking in humility. They felt as if they knew everything because of their mystical piece of parchment and student debt, much as I was pretentious as a teen. I was having to repeat some pretty basic field knowledge, and even afterwards they left me despairing for the fate of the next generation. Again I believed that college wasn't all that if academia was accepting so many offensively sub par applicants, and daring to qualify them without rigorously demonstrating their competence, but it wasn't my place to judge, given that I was so poor at writing rote trivia on paper in a timed environment (which has bountiful real world applications).

The thing is, whether a graduate or not, I worked with people who were happy and fulfilled, and with some people, who had their hobbies and were acknowledged out of need by their peers, yet clearly weren't happy or as near as well adjusted. I am very sour towards graduates, only because my selectively spastic mind excluded me from their ranks, but for most who never will, nor never stood a chance of entering a career of their choice, their time wasn't any better spent than if they'd just done nothing, or took a wage slave position and vanished into the writhing masses of muted desperados.