Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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How'd you get I to a fairly prestigious school with no education. I find that hard to believe as the competition would be great and someone with a below grade six education seems far fetched.
Homeschooling. And I got a high score (apparently a 28 is "high") on my ACT. (The ACT is a test colleges give to assess how "admissible" you are in the U.S. Not sure how different other countries are.) In my state, a high enough ACT score gets you out of highschool the same way a GED does. And a lot of student financial aid is based on ACT score. (Oh, another footnote. My "full ride" didn't cover room and board. Just books and tuition. But I commuted to college all four years, I also got a separate grant from the National Science Foundation, and I qualified for a Pell Grant. So yeah. Had no trouble paying for college in my case.)
I didn't say I didn't get any education after 3rd grade or so. I said I "dropped out of school." Admittedly a bit misleading wording. The way I put it made it sound as if I quit school without the support of my parents and didn't pursue any further education. But I also wanted to make the point that leaving school (the way the OP talks about) definitely doesn't necessarily mean quitting studies.
But yeah. When I said "true story", I meant it. Never was really traditionally "enrolled" in a full coursework of traditional schooling after my 10th birthday until entering college. There was a weekly "homeschool co-op" that I went to for a few years that was kinda school-like. And I did take a couple of like one-day-a-week classes at a private school at one point. I do remember taking part in a summer educational thing that took place in a public school building in my area. Oh, and I forgot that I took a couple of college courses dual-enrolled before I entered college full time. But still, the vast majority of my studies were self study. Taught myself highschool calculus and chemistry and such. My grandmother had to force the issue a bit with history and spelling. But it all seems to have worked.
I guess maybe to finish the story, after college, I started a tech startup with another guy. It crashed and burned within 5 years, but taught me so much that college didn't. (I hate coming off like the self-help crypto-investor startup bro, but I suppose you could call it "failing forward." Not that I planned it that way ahead of time or anything.) And now I'm making a comfortable income overseeing a team of developers (not in a managerial sense, but as a "tech lead", which suits me just fine) at a big-ish (brick-and-morter-and-e-)retailer. I'm quite happy with all the above, of course. As I said, I don't think my experience is typical at all. I've lived a very charmed and lucky life in a lot of ways. But also, My story shows that the traditional educational path of "stay in school kids" isn't the only way, and may not always be the best way to traditional "success" in academics. I've also had coworkers doing software engineering with no college education.