While I don't disagree with some of the points others have made, I won't take a judgemental or overcritical tone, because you sound like you're in a familiar bo

While I don't disagree with some of the points others have made, I won't take a judgemental or overcritical tone, because you sound like you're in a familiar boat. When I was in Uni, I had a hard time accepting the same things, and ultimately didn't, and dropped out. I then accepted what is rarely formally told to you, which is that learning something in Uni is an ancillary artifact of the process of being measured and reduced to a series of numbers on a paper; it's not that it doesn't happen, but most courses in the first two years won't be that inherently challenging, just challenging to accept and keep pushing through. It helps—but is hard—to accept that you only know what you've taught yourself, don't know what you don't know from the assignments and material you're given. So my recommendation is to accept that for a while your preferences don't matter at all, and you're there to be measured, with the positive outcome being that if you can do that, your internal perception of your abilities won't be at odds with what you thought you were capable of convincing yourself to do. After I dropped out, I returned after accepting this, and ended up doing quite well on some courses and poorly on some CS courses, ultimately not finishing because the ostensibly high pressure situation of being in an exam to test whether I can remember Java syntax well-enough to write data structures in it by hand was something I just couldn't validate or convince myself to do well on, despite getting nearly 100% on every assignment. Sometimes you don't get to make choices about how to do something and that's what Uni can help prepare you for. In the military you don't get to pick your own gun, vehicle, wardrobe, or hairstyle, and in a company you might not get to pick your IDE, computer, place of work, coworkers, tasks, programming language, command line tools, runtime, clothing, customers, CRM, or database interface. It's worth noting however that the boomer mentality of "just try harder" is laughably toxic, ineffective, and stupid in many areas of life, and you need to find a way to move through the system like butter on a pan, not like a car through traffic. Sometimes, trial and error and a change in perception work, sometimes they don't and you fail, but it's a personal failure to accept a system that will present it's inadequacies many more times, and figuring out the simple game is often more productive than pushing a boulder uphill and hoping you have enough strength to prevent it from crushing you. There are plenty of other stupid systems people work through willingly, and if they are, it's because they've realized that it's an extremely rare occurrence to be in a position where you can contribute more than just a little at a time to whatever it is you're working on, and often you have to work your way through a lot of shit to get there. So my advice would be to take some samples of the advice I've provided, and others, and recognize that it's good to reflect on your strengths and weaknesses, where you might have a (valid or not) problem with authority, and when you can change your perception of what the task is for great gains.