I liked your article, your persistence, and your confidence. Keep it up! You should do some more editing (straight vs. strait, their vs. there, etc.), but that

I liked your article, your persistence, and your confidence. Keep it up! You should do some more editing (straight vs. strait, their vs. there, etc.), but that's an ancillary concern. Some comments from another STEM undergraduate in the US: You're clearly someone who's a bigger fan of doing things via your own system versus flowing through others' systems. There's, of course, nothing wrong with that. Lots of hacker types have that tendency. Feynman used his own notation for trigonometric functions in high school because he thought the existing one was stupid. It's a handicap in many situations, but an advantage in many others. The world needs both kinds of people. Anyway, point is, the traditional pathways to success are based on certain metrics, and people flowing through that pathway will optimize toward those metrics to the exclusion of others, inflating them (that's Goodhart's Law). You're someone with an aversion to traditional pathways who's trying to reach life goals through those pathways. The system wasn't made for people like you. This automatically puts you at a disadvantage, as your time and effort is spread out between a lot of things, only some of which help up the metric the grad school people are looking for. So take a look at yourself and gauge your skills: you're obviously competent, you're intrinsically motivated, you're persistent, but you're bad at (or your life conditions preclude you from) optimizing to certain metrics. Given this information, if you want to do better, you can either give yourself a handicap (take less credit hours or easier classes) or change the game to something you're better at (look for less GPA-centric grad school programs, consider other future possibilities -- also see etrevino's comment!). In the further future, look for smaller places and higher risk/reward scenarios. Working in those kinds of environments will let you take on challenges on your own terms. Finally, many of the problems you mentioned at college would be nonexistent at a smaller school. At a smaller place, people are more willing to bend rules and to make exceptions given extenuating circumstances. Keep that in mind when making future decisions. Oh, and, yeah, the system is incredibly broken. So are a lot of things in life. the best we can do is often to work around them and push to change them, usually in that order.