> from anyone out there feeling the pressure - i did only well enough in highschool to get into a halfway decent college (good public school), and then graduate

> from anyone out there feeling the pressure - i did only well enough in highschool to get into a halfway decent college (good public school), and then graduated there with a 2.0 out of guilt of wasting my parents' money. i literally had the minimum required GPA to graduate - not a coincidence. i'm not saying you should do this, but it's what happened, and those were the choices i made at that (very) young age. > > i'm doing just fine. people end up all over the map and it usually has very little to do with what they did in school. Absolutely. I went to a pretty dang small school in Kansas (18 in my graduating class), which offered no AP classes and barely even had a calculus class. Followed this up by attending a state college (almost automatic admission for decent students) and now I have a fulfilling job, at an established company I had never heard of, straddling the line of software and hardware that I look forward to going to (almost) every day. I did not push myself 10% as hard as most of the comments on this very thread, even. Life goes on. Now, I may not have the same opportunities available as if I had gone to an engineering school everyone has heard of, but is that worth the cost?