I attended Caltech for CS, struggled with chronic late submissions, cratering self worth and other issues over about three years, took several short leaves ending with a medical leave and was diagnosed with ADHD. Got on medication, got a development job for about a year at UT Southwestern and enjoyed it immensely. Decided to come back and try again, but coming back to junior and senior level classes after a break was very hard, and even being back in the environment that I associated with such failure was hugely draining. I decided to withdraw indefinitely.

I'd already finished all but one or two of my CS requirements, most of the rest were going to be maybe 4-5 non-CS math/engineering/science classes, several humanities and a biology. About a year and a trimester's worth. As far as GPA, I left with about a 2.7.

I'm still not sure if that was the right decision. Part of me says I'm living in LA and I have a year of work on my resume, a bunch of knowledge from the tech CS program, a couple of mildly interesting personal projects on my GitHub, and I should be ok; I just need to put myself out there.

Another part of me says I'm a piece of shit that can't complete the only thing worth completing related to my career, I'm going to have to explain why I don't have a degree to everyone I ever interview with, and why would anyone ever pick me over a graduate.

All this made more painful by the fact that if I had graduated, the Caltech degree would have been an amazing asset - and if I had gone anywhere else (well, anywhere a bit less high powered) I believe I would have at least graduated, if not done very well. Source: the two sophomore CS classes I took at UT Arlington in half a summer and got A+s in both.

This thread is hard to read. Thanks for your story; I need to remember people like you exist while I'm job hunting.

The best actionable advice I can give you is: put Caltech on your resume with your years of attendance, leave off your GPA entirely, and indicate in text under that that it's incomplete. You'll need a compelling narrative around why it's incomplete (which is admittedly difficult and usually circumstance-specific) or why it doesn't matter too much given that you've done X. X is something impressive, uncommon, and shows intelligence and initiative. As an example, my Xs were getting press in lifehacker for a side project and doing well in a FANG hackathon while in school.

For jobs, I think a common myth is that your credentials/resume is hugely important. From what I've seen, this is both true and false. The _specifics_ of your resume don't really matter 99% of the time, only that they're interesting. Also, keep in mind most resumes are screened by a real, live human - being authentic and passionate can help out as a break from the BS a recruiter sees day-to-day (but do think about what a recruiter would be looking for at a glance). After you clear the resume filter, you're on a similar playing field vs. every other candidate. And then it's up to you and your ability to pass interviews - that's a whole other topic which I won't cover here =P

If it helps, feel free to reach out through linkedin or email in my profile. Stay focused and keep your chin up!

Your GitHub projects are extremely valuable, some of the more interesting companies have scripts that automatically search for open source contributors to widely used projects on GitHub . I didn't even go to college and am paid at a competitive level for my experience with recruiters contacting me daily on LinkedIn, though I'm not a pure software developer (DevOps). Keep working on those GitHub projects, solve algorithm questions on LeetCode/Hackerrank/ any of the competitive programming sites, always be learning something new. The debt and stress with a college degree isn't worth it when no sane project owner on GH will reject a PR due to college credentials, thereby continuing to increase the value of your own resume in addition to your work experience.