You're young yet

Some bits of further advice. Pick one or more, take them to heart,
and discard those that don't apply.


Take a few years, work for a living, join the service, whatever.
Older, returning students who come back ready to focus on something
they want are famous for doing better than barely-adults who go
galloping off in all directions. (Especially if one of those
directions is toward the nearest party. Nothing personal; I'm just
trying to cover all bases.)


When the right opportunity comes up, take a course or two at whatever
college or trade school suits your fancy and REALLY APPLY YOURSELF.
This does more than convey facts and skills. It builds confidence at
the school game (something you're doubtless sorely lacking just now,
having at best fought your coursework to an armed truce and at worst
gotten your butt kicked), and keeps you in practice at kicking your
friends out, turning off the game, and cracking the books.


Talk to the advisors at said institution about what tests you can take
to find out whether your problem was nothing more or less than an
inadequate foundation for college-level math and engineering. Some
friends who went the faculty route can and do just go ON and on and on
about how much time they spend teaching remedial high school -- maybe
you came in behind the curve and never caught up.


Don't let middle-class circumstance put the golden handcuffs on you.
You are a work in progress and can drive an old car and live in a
smaller place while saving money and building skills for the
completion. These days, holding onto that attitude through an
advanced degree (once you have a vision of what that degree should be
in, of course) has a lot to recommend it.


Said vision is important. All this may reinforce your desire to
become an aircraft designer and prepare yourself for that rather hard
major. Or maybe you'll discover that you're happier and better suited
for another profession or trade -- where is it written that at 18 you
know what you want to do? This may be in the aerospace field or not;
it may consist of pushing a mouse around a desk or not.

Maybe the reason for your poor performance was personal. Maybe it was
inadequate preparation. Or maybe it was your inner self recoiling at
the difference between what you imagined the profession to be about
and what it really is about. Well, the world needs aerospace
engineers, and also aerospace machinists, history teachers, chefs, the
good honest car mechanic everybody seems to have so much trouble
finding, veterinarians, and a thousand other things.

Just keep in mind that the result of your education thus far is a
setback and something you'll have to explain now and then for a while,
but it is not a disaster. Work hard and you'll probably find
yourself able to direct people's focus toward the things you excelled
in as a focused and disciplined adult, not the things you fumbled the
first few years out of high school.


And it'll be good practice in case you realize many years from now
that Act II (or III) of your adulthood calls for another rethinking
and/or another increment of formal education. Maybe "completion of a
work in progress" wasn't the right thing to say earlier -- "completion
of the present phase" is more like it; and the designers are
notorious for barging in unexpectedly with a new set of prints.


One man's opinions, worth what you paid if your connect time is cheap,
--Joe