I despised the academic parts of school. The work was hilariously irrelevant, the requirements totally arbitrary, and the expectations set so ridiculously high

I despised the academic parts of school. The work was hilariously irrelevant, the requirements totally arbitrary, and the expectations set so ridiculously high that even though I've been in the workforce for a few years now, I still have anxieties and insecurities about my engineering ability that trace back to school being set up such that you're expected to fail all the time yet still somehow graduate. Often, it felt like school was actively working against me in my drive to become a better engineer. I quickly learned to give my engineering side-projects a higher priority than schoolwork. Schoolwork could always expand infinitely to fill as much time as it wanted, and school was a hideous monster that would swallow every ounce of effort I put into it, take it for all for granted, and only greedily demand more of me. If I'd played along with that, I would've had to give up the drive to build things that made me want to pursue engineering as a career in the first place. I had an industry internship every summer while I was in college, and I found an industry job - which paid more than my program's average undergrad starting salary - the afternoon after my last final exam. I say this because I want to emphasize that even by the standards of my school's career department I have """succeeded""" - yet every single one of those positions made absolutely no use of the things I was forced to do or learn to get my degree, and extensive use of the skills I learned by ignoring schoolwork and focusing on personal projects. I can't say with certainty that school did absolutely nothing for me: my current manager says that even though he didn't look at my academics at all, he likely never would've seen my resume if it didn't have a degree on it. But while I can count on one hand the number of times something at work has been remotely relevant to my schoolwork, the number of panic attacks and depressive spirals caused by anxieties rooted in my experience in the academic environment is beyond countless.