A leading professor convinced me that I should do a B.S. Chemical Engineering saying that I could accomplish anything with it. I was more interested in architecture, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, and later show business. I did not have a lot of money and I did not think I measured up to the other students so I just chose to go with it.
When the time came to do internships, I found a mis-match between my interests and jobs available for my major. The end result is I interviewed and applied to very few companies and did not obtain a valuable internship. One time later when asked by a recruiter if I wanted job I told them I wanted to go to graduate school. I thought at the time that this would be more challenging and give me more flexibility in career options.
I ended up getting a M.S. in Chemical Engineering after being forced to resign from one school. I thought I could not afford to change course when going to graduate school and ended up working with the same leading professor as in my undergrad. My graduation was delayed because I had trouble locating information and was not offered formal training in programming. Many days I found myself reading literature in nuclear fusion in an attempt to either distract myself from the pain or when waiting on needed information.
Following graduation, I was really scared. I did not know where to go job wise, and I felt that the people in the department had a horrible opinion of me. I did get a job a year or two later A year or so after graduation teaching undergraduate chemistry lab as an adjunct professor. I was later let go due to inability to meet standards of the institution. I now work fast food.
I put a lot of value in self-education. I must have checked out hundreds of books from the library, ranging from numerical analysis to stage management. I pursued my fusion project after graduation as well as a quiz website idea that would make it easier for newcomers (like me) to understand fusion knowledge (of the open source community) without building a bench scale fusion reactor. I ended up focusing on the quiz website idea, which eventually became a distributed economy idea.
Developing this distributed economy idea led me to interact with many in the web community, including Manu Sporny who is working towards on the first web payments standard, and one in Tim Berners-Lee’s group. My desire for a test server led me to become friends with many in the network security community, which has given me knowledge about the computer underworld, lock picking, and fire arms. I also developed an interest in open science, which led me to eventually contact John Wilbanks due to his presentations about the semantic web applied to publications. He suggested that I become involved with the Open Knowledge Foundation, so I now follow them.
I feel alienated from traditional institutions, and suffer a lot of frustration going though the hoops that they typically require. I see my distributed economy as a theoretical way to work more autonomously of them (and give others who lack credentials but have talent opportunities) while at the same time see all of the semantically related options to make more informed decisions about which opportunties to engage in. If I would have done things differently, I would have found an advisor and went to a different school in undergrad. This would have saved me to difficulty of re-engineering things from the ground up (but I may have not been as challenged).