Ask HN: I just don't care anymore. Any advice?
I've recently realized that college is killing my desire to do anything programming related. However, as I'm a full-time student without a job, dropping out and not working at Burger King boils down to getting lucky (although I've had a few headhunters call me, so maybe that's a start).

The reason I'm so underwhelmed is that in highschool, I really took off with a passion for computer programming. By my senior year, I was fairly fluent in Python and PHP, and I was spending time reading and working my hardest to finish the exercises in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. In addition to that, I started working (and have kept on working) at mastering C, Common Lisp and Haskell. It was somewhere between starting to read "Godel, Escher, Bach" and learning the basics of the theory of computation that I also fell in love with mathematics. I was pretty apathetic towards everything related to highschool, but I could take AP classes and get an 'A' with no effort while spending the rest of my time studying things I cared about, so it didn't seem all that bad. When applying to college, I had scores to get into/get noticed by a couple of nice-to-decent range schools (Columbia, RIT, Rose Hulman; my GPA/scores were consistent with the bar for Duke, CMU and others). The problem is, while I had put in minimal effort to get a really high GPA and nice test scores, I wasn't the minority captain of the football YMCA church team thing, so I didn't really stand a chance of getting scholarships at nicer schools. Since I have to pay for everything myself, I decided to enroll at the state university which gave me a nice chunk of cash to attend. Problem solved, right?

Fast forward to college, where my first programming class considers 'for' looping and arrays to be advanced techniques, and where showing that you know more than what is taught is actually considered cheating, and I'm burnt after the first semester. The thing is, there are so many things that I don't know (and so many of them are things that I want to learn), so the idea of just 'dropping out' is absurd, since I'm sure there are people here who can help me learn the material even better than if I was doing it on my own. At the same time, every class is a boring trudge that promises me that it's the last boring class I'll have to take and then it'll all be exciting from here and blah blah blah blah. The litmus test I used recently was "If I didn't have a scholarship, would I pay to take this class?" I realized that I probably would not pay for a single CS class offered here. I made it through last semester fairly unscathed, but this time around I feel an extreme apathy setting in. My grades are just at the beginning point of slipping - they're not quite terrible, but they're not the high 'A's I'm used to. This is purely due to my lack of interest.

What should I do? Should I just drop out? That seems like a bad idea, since at this point I know enough to know I don't know that much at all. Should I switch to something non-CS, and then just study CS on my own while occasionally popping in and picking the brains of the faculty? I'm sure some of you who've been through this exact dilemma are scoffing at me not finding the obvious answer myself through "soul-searching", but I really haven't found anyone who feels the same way I do to discuss this with. I've gone for too long without asking for help or advice.