[jpm_sd]

I got terrific grades until very late in high school, when I realized it was all stupid busy work and I didn't care about any of it any more. Luckily GPA was still high enough to get into my pick of colleges.

Then I nearly failed out of engineering school (twice!) because all we did was tortuous math problems and we never designed or built anything, it was overwhelmingly disappointing. I came out of that program depressed and exhausted.

I graduated into a pretty terrible job market and managed to score a single offer for an entry-level engineering position. I finally had something real to do! I worked 60 hours a week teaching myself everything I had actually wanted to know, through a combination of digging up info on the internet and making a lot of rapid mistakes in classic "fail fast" fashion. And eventually I applied for a masters' degree program, which I did part-time (one class per semester) while working.

That was 20 years ago, these days I'm a "principal engineer" at a rapidly growing start-up. Still struggling with imposter syndrome from time to time.