May 24, 2026

Why I Dropped Out

I originally wanted to go to Chapman because of the film school. I was into video production for a while, worked for a production company in high school, owned a camera, thought I might want to direct something someday. By the time I actually enrolled I’d mostly moved on from that and was doing a business major as a catch-all. That probably should have been the first sign.

I’ve never been good at school, or honestly I’ve never been interested in the concept of school and how subjects are taught. I genuinely have a bad memory, I test poorly, and the whole loop of learning information, memorizing it long enough to pass a test, and then forgetting it has never made sense to me as a way to learn anything. Junior and senior year of high school I switched to online community college and did two classes a semester so I could actually spend my time on things I cared about. By the time I got to Chapman I hadn’t really done traditional school in two years.

Freshman year was four classes. I didn’t do great. I was working on Layout the whole time and I wasn’t giving school the attention it needed, which meant I wasn’t giving Layout the attention it needed either. Neither thing was getting done to a level I was satisfied with.

I decided to give it one more semester before making the final call. I switched to part-time, two classes. I basically never went since the classes I was taking we’re either about making a resume or reading microsoft excel data. I got a C in one, and the other one I failed because I forgot about the midterm and slept through the final since I was working on Layout till 5am.

I definitely knock on college a lot, however, there are parts that I actually liked a lot about being at Chapman. The people I met, the hackathons, the random conversations with friends that turned into ideas. That stuff was super beneficial and I’d do it again. What I don’t think was a fit is Chapman specifically. It’s a film school that happens to have a business program. I needed to be around people who were building companies, who were obsessive about their own things. That culture just wasn’t there in the same way, and I don’t think that’s a knock on Chapman. It’s just a different place for different people.

The thing that actually made the decision clear was a simple question: if I’m putting this little into Layout and it’s still moving, what would it look like if I gave it everything? I think the answer is a lot. And we’re at a moment in tech where I don’t want to look back and wonder. AI is shifting what’s possible faster than anything I’ve seen, and I’m sitting on infrastructure that could sit directly underneath that shift. If I’m going to find out whether this works, now is the time to find out.

I’m glad about the decision. I don’t think dropping out is the right move for most people. It wasn’t really about college being bad, it was about this being the right time for me to stop splitting my attention. That’s the whole thing.