31 years old - in a couple of days I reach my 3rd year anniversary in the industry. I had the typical profile of a student who was going to get into any colleg

31 years old - in a couple of days I reach my 3rd year anniversary in the industry. I had the typical profile of a student who was going to get into any college I wanted (700+ on both math & verbal on the SAT I, 740 in Math in 7th grade, 800 on the SAT II Math 2C in 8th grade, 730+ on 5 SAT IIs, including Writing, captain of varsity tennis team for 4 years, played varsity for 5, etc.), but ended up not getting admitted to any of them, in large part due to my bad college essay. I went to a state school in NY instead, and entered college with 56 college credits (including Calculus III/Multivariable Calculus & Linear Algebra in 10th grade, and college chemistry & differential equations courses). I was a bit of a bad student in college - failed 3 courses in my majors (math & mathematical physics) in part due to laziness. After my second year, I turned around my work ethic and started working hard again of my own volition, and excelled. I dropped out of my PhD math program at UIUC after 4 years, largely due to extra-academic issues. Spent 2 1/2 years looking for a career track job - I was willing to do whatever it took, I even enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve to try to get a better chance. 2 years into the search, I got fed up looking for any sort of job, so then I started teaching myself programming. A half year later, I got my first job, but my efforts at learning did not stop there - I experimented with tech from didn't languages/platforms from Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, PHP, and Node.js. My first job also had me doing frontend, and using angular.js just before it became hot. I was mentored to drill down into source code to figure things out. I also lurked in the angular IRC channel and asked for help once in a while, but also tried to help as many people as possible. As I spent more time in the angular community & using angular, I became uncommonly versed in the intricacies of the framework, and picked up being disciplined in writing unit tests. This turns out to translate very well in the profession, and I have been able to turn this to become a lead frontend engineer at one point - I switched jobs 4 times so far, and am currently a senior engineer who does some open source in my spare time (lead development on UI Bootstrap, developer for the ng-bootstrap & UI Router projects, occasionally contribute to Angular). Some luck, and self-initiative, hard work, and smart decision making has helped me succeed.