[jba]

I don't feel like posting the entire story right now, but I might someday as I think I actually have something to add to these zillion threads.

I dropped out of college about 2-3 semesters away from my degree. It had nothing to do with poker, but it was a somewhat similar situation in some respects. I was studying CS and got a pretty incredible job offer that required me moving from the podunk state I grew up in.

some of my reasons:
- This was back in 1999 when there were some unbelievable oppurtunities to pull in the kind of money that 99.99% of pro poker players never dream of.
- I was working full time while going to school (primarily for financial reasons), and going to a commuter school, so the "good times" were considerably less than typical college experience.
- I was banking on getting enough experience/contacts during the boom years to float me afterwords. In 1999 if you could breath and knew how to spell HTML you could get any job you wanted and make a ridiculous amount of money, and I knew I was far better than most.

So here I am six years later. I have worked for four companies since quitting school, lasted through the big bust, and I currently have a great job with very good job security and am quite pleased with the money that I make. Anyone applying for my job off monster.com without a college degree would not make it past the receptionist, but in software referrals and networking are huge, and something catastrophic would have to happen for me to worry about job security - I can literally call a dozen people this afternoon and line up a job somewhere else. If my boss (or any of my former bosses) had to choose between an unknown MIT C.S. grad with five years experience and me, he would pick me. As far as social stigma there is some but to be honest when you tell someone you are a software engineer they just make assumptions and it basically never comes up. If I had to do it all over again I am positive I would make the same choices.

Despite all this, I'd say about 75% of the reason I'm studying this game is so I can quit working and go back to school. It makes every post I read from some kid dropping out of school pretty ironic; instead of "quitting school to play poker", my perspective is "playing poker to unquit school".

Dropping out of school to play poker, IMHO, is insane. I mean school isn't really all that time consuming and considering the fact that I was putting in 40-50 hrs/week while in school, I just can't figure out why you guys don't just suck it up, stay in school, and play poker for 20 hrs/week. makes no sense at all to me.


cheers, be cool stay in school