Longer Form
I will try to write something here when I can.
Leaving School and My Best Interests
Over the past few months, I have made decisions that many or all of the people who I trust (those who I know care about me and have a track record of good decision-making) think have negative expected value. Here I want to give you a sense of why I made these decisions the way I did.
Here are two stories about my childhood:
Story One:
My experience at school has followed a more or less downward trend since its high in Pre-K. I remember in the following grades that progressively more time was designated to sitting still and doing less interesting things. Usually, these took the form of committing certain skills or facts to memory (writing, reading, multiplying combinations of 1 to 2 digit numbers). Then eventually we got onto kinds of knowledge that at least theoretically might be more interesting to someone who is curious about most things (which I am). But these subjects, which ranged in math, history, science, language, and English, still felt like a muted form of learning. I was never, or at least only rarely, excited to be in class or do homework despite the fact that I would often pursue closely related academic subjects outside of the classroom. The question of why exactly my broad curiosity reached a dead end in classwork was frustrating because it was deeply confusing and equally inconvenient (due to the many structures that rely on academic performance, or at least expect that academic programs impart some amount of knowledge onto the people participating in them). By the end of high school, I submitted very little of my homework and almost none of it on time. I was frequently experiencing panic attacks and other anxious episodes related to classwork and other forms of depression. While I had hoped that these were a matter of the specific learning environment that I was in, this conjecture proved false as my experience at Deep Springs proved.
Story Two:
Growing up I was very interested in building things. I was also very curious about understanding phenomena that didn’t fit into my limited mental model of how the world worked (for instance, why cars moved without someone or something pushing them, or how my remote control car could follow the instructions I gave it through a physically detached controller, most curious of all, how did the computer work—what drew all the pictures on the screen and how was it possible to do it all so quickly as I interacted with it?). The interplay between my interest in building things and my interest in understanding them is core to much of what I do now and what I did when I was younger. I coded in Scratch and Java throughout elementary school. In fourth grade, I wrote an essay about different kinds of engines (ICE, electric, jet, and rocket) and how they each worked. Along with the essay, I built a little electric motor. In middle school, I coded some C for Arduino projects like my keyboard and built a simple PCB for it too. By high school, I had started to take on more complicated projects and found less success in them. Though I was more capable, the scale of my interest and excitement seemed to always get ahead of the amount of time I was able to commit to things (not always a lot between increasing demands of school and my running regime), and I would often find myself stuck or unmotivated because of the slowness of my progress. Looking back, I lacked what most call “follow-through”—when problems appeared too difficult, I wouldn't always put in the work to make the easiest solution work. In my last year of high school, something changed. In the same two weeks, three things happened to me. One was my last cross-country meet of my last season, the second was the deadline for the first round of Deep Springs essays, and the third was my learning about and submitting a design on Google’s Open Silicon Multi-Project Wafer. Each of these things required my complete focus and I gave that to each of them. I realized the extent to which success in doing hard things (physical, intellectual, or technical) was a choice for me to make with the application of my will. During this time, I did little to no schoolwork in school or out of it and didn’t always sleep as much as was healthy. Ultimately, it was worth it because I learned that if I applied myself to problems I wanted to solve or things I wanted to do, I could create a virtuous cycle of achievement, satisfaction, excitement, and focus.
These two stories were deeply confusing because the contrast between my emotional and intellectual self outside of school versus in school was so stark.
At Deep Springs, I never found a balance. I assume at this point that this is because I was never able to find satisfaction or excitement in the intellectual work done there, which focused on areas in the humanities where it was acceptable to make logically incoherent claims. When I tried to bring my outside intellectual work into my life at Deep Springs, my numerous responsibilities to the community made it very nearly impossible to do so. My main attempt at this was during term 3 when I decided to build a much more complex digital logic design than I ever had previously. I spent literally every waking hour that I wasn’t working on something critical to my being at Deep Springs on this project. Doing this was not a sustainable solution. I was working too much to stay sane and healthy. By the end of my time at Deep Springs, I was too depressed and anxious to do any intellectual work in or outside of the classroom and spent at least a couple of days a week in my room too anxious to leave to do anything.
During my term off, I felt like I was recovering the use of my mind. When I returned to campus for my second year’s graduation, a classmate of mine asked me if I was going to return for my second year and without a moment’s thought, I answered that I wouldn’t. So in some sense, the reason I made the decision without any calculation of expected value or use of critical thinking. What I view as the real decision came right after I said I wouldn't return when I realized what had happened and chose not to clarify that I wasn’t sure.
I trust all of the people who told me repeatedly throughout high school and Deep Springs that dropping out was a mistake. That my sunk costs in these experiences were not worth giving up, and that the usefulness of completing these programs for the rest of my life would make up for whatever I would lose in the process of finishing them. The choice I made just after my gut reaction to say I would not come back was not primarily a judgment about the value of having completed Deep Springs. This choice was about the fact that all previous signs pointed to the fact that I might not be in control of what happened to me if I stayed. There was a meaningful chance that my mind and body would repeatedly shut down in the ways that they had during the prior semester. At best, this looks like deep unhappiness, very bad grades, and inhibited learning outside of the classroom. At worst, this looks like a totally debilitating experience of anxiety and depression likely resulting in my having to leave anyway. My experience at Deep Springs progressively tended towards the latter over my five terms there. I had little reason to believe that this might change.
As many college applicants, professors, and parents will openly tell you, people don’t usually attend schools based on soul-searching for what pedagogical program suits them best. In fact, most haven’t done much exploring about how they learn best because of the degree to which even progressive education places students into more or less similar relationships to the presentation of ideas and work at understanding them. People often go to college based on which one is perceived by the most people to be the most impressive. At Deep Springs, this is slightly different because the experience is often defined by collective community standards for pedagogy rather than purely institutional ones, but the point still holds.
If as a student you struggle to understand or invest yourself in the form of learning you participate in, do the hard work of exploring how it is you learn and what it is you care about. Then take full responsibility for putting yourself in a position to succeed not just by other people’s standards but also by your own. At least in my experience, it has repeatedly surprised me how capable I am when I believe in my work because I am putting all of my energy and focus towards it as a result.
The choice not to backtrack on my statement that I would leave school represented a bet on something I had complete control over (my ability to build technology that helps people by exploiting my abilities and opportunities) and an abandonment of a system controlled by others that had a ten-year track record of running me into the ground.
This bet represented me making a proposition to myself about my future. The proposition was one that I will always trust myself completely to make the right call on.
To fail or do what you love.