So once upon a time, there was this girl named Joyce. She went to this high school for those who were talented in math and science. She had always been good at both (and well, almost everything else that involved books and studying.) She didn't realize that the high school mostly taught you how to think and how to be smart; the math and science education was not the only thing there was to the experience. She came out with reasonably decent grades and thinking that, as she was so good at math and science and was interested in how things worked and were put together and might like to learn how to build things like computers, she would go to the local big state university that was an excellent engineering school and become an engineer.
So she went off to school, and immediately took on too much, with a heavy class load and working nearly full time and a bit of extracurricular activities on top of that. And she discovered that she either wasn't nearly as good at math and science as she thought, or that engineering does not equal math and science, or both, because for the first time in her life, she was doing badly in school. But she kept forging ahead, getting C's and D's in her engineering classes and A's and B's in everything else, because dang it, she was supposed to be an engineer and that's what she was going to do and besides, everyone got bad grades in engineering classes. She started to think that she didn't like engineering so much, but didn't want to throw in the towel. She even picked up the paperwork one time to add a second major in English, but didn't go through with it. She eventually changed from computer engineering to computer science, after utterly, spectacularly, painfully failing Circuits I. Why she thought that comp sci would be any better, as it took her THREE tries to get a C in the second semester of programming, your narrator knows not, but these things are so much easier to see almost a decade removed from the decision.
If you look at the girl's transcript the semester before the semester she dropped out, you see an A in biology, a B+ in tech writing, an A in a multidisciplinary studies course, a B in criminology (that B will greatly annoy her a decade hence, as it will prevent her from having a 4.0 in her major GPA), and a D in the sole comp sci course she took that semester. The girl could seriously not see the forrest for the trees.
Anyhow, the next semester, the girl ran out of non-comp sci courses to take, and so signed up for three. And promptly realized that she hated all of it, and dropped out of school. (It took approximately five minutes to convince the counseling center to give her the psych drop, too. That was not the hard part.)
Anyhow, the girl moved around for awhile, saying she would go back to school eventually. And eventually she did, doing some community college classes in Sociology and realizing that that was more like it. She applied to school in Washington, and didn't get in, and thought about her options a lot, and about how much she missed her family too, and how much she would miss people in Seattle if she left, and eventually packed up and moved back to North Carolina, despite missing Seattle and the people in it like crazy. (There were more than likely other options in Washington, but she missed her family like crazy, too. She often wishes she could fold this country in half; it would make life much easier.) She waited a year to reestablish residency, and then she gave her former university $25 and a form, and they were happy to let her come back to school and change majors to sociology. And she's proceeded to get a 4.0 for the last two semesters, and she will have her piece of paper in May, and she's utterly thrilled.