In this personal narrative, the speaker recounts his decision to leave college in the fall of 2021. He describes the campus environment during the COVID pandemic as oppressive: strict mask mandates, limited building access, and a culture that mocked mask compliance. Academic instruction was entirely asynchronous, with professors merely sharing YouTube videos, which did not suit his visual learning style. The combination of these restrictive conditions, deteriorating grades, and the opportunity to earn money led him to prioritize building a business over completing his degree, despite his original desire to finish college and play four years of tennis.
Chapters
I'm not like proud to call myself a dropout. Like, I would have loved to finish college and play 4 years of tennis. Yeah. But when I went back in, so that was fall of 2021, it was so unbelievably miserable. It was genuine prison. You weren't allowed to go into any building that you didn't live in. So it's like you wanted to go to your buddy's place, you couldn't. You had to wear your mask outside on campus even. No, are you serious? And it was the culture at this school too where it's like— It was a very liberal school. Yeah. And it was like even your mask was under your nose. Like someone's going to try to snipe a picture of you and like send it to them. Are you kidding me? Ridiculous. I was in the gym running on the treadmill and the treadmills were already socially distanced, so they were 6 feet apart. Yeah. And I have my mask under my nose because I'm running a 5-minute mile and I can barely breathe. And a worker comes over and it's like, mask over your nose. And I'm like, absolutely not. I almost got kicked out for that. You can pass out and get much more injured. The professors, they didn't even bother making their own lectures to send you. They would just send me YouTube videos to watch per class. It was all asynchronous. So it was like, oh, just do this class whenever you can do this class. I honestly just started falling behind. I couldn't learn like that. I'm a very visual person. Like, I would have to be in a classroom. So you pay for— yeah. Did they drop the price? No. And my grades got awful with you, to be honest, because I was making money and I was like, I'm not gonna screw this.
