Very well put. Very sorry to hear about your experiences - I think this highlights quite clearly what a serious thing burnout can be. Hopefully you won't mind

Very well put. Very sorry to hear about your experiences - I think this highlights quite clearly what a serious thing burnout can be. Hopefully you won't mind if I mention my experience - though I didn't do a computer science degree (something I very much regret), my engineering degree was a very difficult time for me - a family situation carried on throughout the degree, a very, very serious situation (and also very personal, so not going to go into detail), as well as very many other bad things happening to me on what was already a ridiculously difficult workload (my Alma mater has a great reputation based on working people into the ground). There are so many stories I could tell about that time... will stick with just one, however - in my final year my dissertation supervisor treated me like a research assistant - going off and looking at stuff for him which he'd review then throw away, rinse + repeat all year until 2 weeks before the dissertation deadline when he told me I didn't have a project (if I didn't hand anything in that would have been my degree over with, I would have had to repeat the entire final year elsewhere, and would find it hard to actually get a job, so pretty damn major). After 2 weeks of 18-hour days I managed to write a 100-page dissertation and code (in fortran!!) the entire model myself. I eventually got an A grade for the dissertation despite everything, but this supervisor told me afterwards I couldn't pursue a PhD with him because I was a bad student (yeah, kinda dodged a bullet there, not to mention that it would have been a distraction from what I've come to realise was always my calling - programming). In fact my degree choice was largely influenced by 'spiritual' beliefs held by my family, so I had the endless conflict of not actually liking my subject (I wanted to do maths or computer science) while trying to actually survive it. I can't tell you how absolutely destructive that was, it's taken 6 years to even be able to cope with studying on my own, let alone doing the kind of work I need to go in the direction I want to with programming. Anyway, now things are way more positive, focusing on studying the things I need to learn while avoiding burnout (see my other post). A lot of it is getting over the impact it has on self-esteem. Trust me, burning out like that is like a forest fire for the ego.