[danudey]

As a 31-year-old systems architect and software developer who dropped out of university: I realized that I had to choose between a degree I would enjoy that would be useless in getting me a job, and a degree that I would hate that would be useless in getting me a job. I wasn't cut out for EE or CS, and I didn't have the math marks to get in (and I didn't realize at the time that a lot of my problem was ADD-related). So… I left.

In the end, I lucked my way through a succession of jobs, due in part to the fact that my chosen career, systems admin, doesn't really have a university career path leading to it, so my personal experience was worth as much as anyone else's.

My recommendation: do lots of projects, contribute to open-source, put a bunch of personal projects up on github (and do them right; document them well and write good code), and apply to forward-thinking companies (startups, etc.). Show that you can do the work and no company worth their salt will care too much about how you learned it.

[gwright]

> due in part to the fact that my chosen career, systems admin, doesn't really have a university career path leading to it

I need to put a plug in for my alma mater: http://www.rit.edu/programs/networking-and-systems-administr...