HACKER Q&A
📣 CoronaFreshman

Feeling Lost as a Freshman, Should I Just Drop Out?


I'm a non-EU international student in my freshman year of CS in an university in The Netherlands, for as long as I can remember it's been my goal to go abroad and study, due to the poor quality of education offered in institutions in my home country (Malaysia) and of course to gain the experience of living abroad.

I've been doing well academically (>7.5's), up till my mental health could no longer keep me going. I had a little stumble when a project fell apart and in the last month I've been working hard to simply get back to it but it's been incredibly difficult.

It's been months that I've been here now and I've yet to see the inside of any of my classrooms, I've not met any of my classmates outside of my orientation group (many of whom have since left the university). It's incredibly difficult to find any motivation whatsoever.

The 'central loop' of my life consists of getting out of bed, into the shower, getting to my computer desk, working till the school days up to prepare a meal, clean up, watch some streaming content and back to sleep. Having lived this loop day after day, knowing the school work I'm doing has no real effect whatsoever, is even more of a disconnect from reality.

I'm afraid staying here will kill my passion for technology, not long ago I'd be extremely excited for the content being thought in my classes now, I was actually going through teachyourselfcs.com's curriculum prior to being admitted here.

This post is a little incoherent but I guess what I'm looking for is a little advice on how to proceed, as an only child, with a lot of money invested into by my parents, poor job prospects without a degree and rapidly deteriorating mental health I just feel lost.


  👤 iab Accepted Answer ✓
It’s truly difficult to offer anything useful or concrete in this exceedingly strange time. I would ask though, how is your physical health? Are you able to exercise outside at all?

👤 CoronaFreshman
I didn’t want to include this in the main post at the risk of seeming needy or job seeking, so I ask here do I have any chance if I leave now? The 'skills' I posses are rather limited in the sense of my depth of knowledge in them but I've decided to list them anyway.

'Languages' Java - SQL - Haskell - JavaScript/TypeScript - Python - MATLAB

'Web Technologies' Svelte/Sapper - HTML/CSS - Maintaining a domain / mail server

'Low Level' Arduino (AVR Assembly and general electronics)

And a bunch of random linux knowhow, i.e. bash scripting, PAM implementations, containerisation etc.