The racism, discrimination, and segregation. As a Native American in a white school, it was frequently traumatic. Frequently assaulted and threatened by teachers and the principal to cut my long hair. Then had to sit in class to learn about how all those things I was actively experiencing were in America’s past was bullshit. <30 years ago.

Waking up early. Also the harest part of my work - trying to complete complex work while I can barely stay awake.

Having undiagnosed autism and parents not believing in it. I fucking hated school

The hardest part for me was the way the criteria for success changed between high school and college.

I aced high school because high school requires one to be smart. But I barely scraped by in college because college requires self-organization and discipline.

Nobody really sat me down and raised the flag on how bad my habits were, before college. The message I always got was about how “gifted” I was and how the world would be my oyster because I’m so smart.

The only person really striving to teach me discipline in high school was my track and cross country coach. For that I’m eternally grateful, because it could have been a lot worse.

But most of my adult life has been spent struggling to develop consistent output, struggling to keep promises, struggling to show up consistently.

Don’t know if that’s gotten better since I was a kid, but if I could change one thing it would be to do a lot more to train kids to fit into a structure where others are relying on them to deliver things on time. To keep working when things get hard, and not to rest too heavily on being “smart” as a plan for future success.

Smart is like 1% of success. The rest is conscientiousness.

Adhd didn’t exist back then.

Not getting to have “schooling”. I was “homeschooled”, in that my parents kept all 8 of us kids at home and didn’t bother to provide much in the way of education beyond reading and basic math. The lack of real education I was able to overcome, but the gross lack of any socialization has left me struggling with poor social competency to this day.

Putting the work in.

Going without motivation.

I graduated college the first time with straight C’s and major that didn’t have much headroom. It was a struggle and I was a terrible student. Always late, always bargaining with professors for extra time, always “faking it”. I couldn’t find work fitting a degree, went on to do landscaping work, field surveying work, security, all minimum wage.

Then I got into firefighting, then wildland firefighting, then saw how computer science and geospatial data played in, and the motivation clicked.

I saved my money from a pair of very very busy fire seasons (lots of OT and hazard pay), Went back to school for CS and GIS with straight A’s, found the whole experience easy and enjoyable. (Not that I wasn’t challenged and had late nights). If you’ve dug ditches for money and don’t want to do that any more, the asks and challenges of college are comparatively trivial. Even in upper division classes the teachers are crystal clear about the expectations, the schedule, the tests, all of it. If you approach classwork like a job, it all falls into place in ways it never did when I had competing interests and really just wanted to fuck off, drink beer, and go skiing.

Everyone else wants to go do whatever during office hours ? Nah Im there. Every time. Etc etc

Motivation made all the difference, even when content was hard for me (linear algebra after 5 years of no academic math? Fuuuck that was some late nights for my dumb ass. )

I flunked out of nursing school despite the content itself being fairly easy because I didn’t know how to deal with mean girl shit yet. I passed the second time by just doing whatever they told me to until I graduated. In particular, I remembered some advice from years earlier from an older roommate who had just gotten back from their coast guard training. They said their goal had been to go as long as possible before the instructor even knew their name. Honestly that’s been a pretty great strategy for me when I’ve needed to escape abuses of power ever since; keep your head down, do whatever they tell you to, don’t draw attention to yourself, then book it the first chance you get.

Dealing with dumb people, fuck… that was awful.