I've had a few. Too many to mention, in fact, so I'll hit the highlights: reading the Cliff's Notes for The Tempest instead of the actual play, not finishing Crime and Punishment because now I never will, doing my senior English seminar on Cowboy Fucking Poetry because nothing else fit into my godawful schedule, chickening out of the Spanish composition and literature class I tested into my first quarter in college (and subsequently forgetting all my Spanish), choosing Poli Sci instead of History for my second major, going to law school ...

Oh, and that other thing, but it didn't really happen, or at least not to me. So best not to mention it.

How about you?

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Answers

Not studying enough. Allowing myself to get sucked into the slacker circle instead of the smart people who actually worked in school. Letting myself slide off the honor roll and never motivating myself to get back up there. Not finishing college. Taking so long to get back into it. Not taking courses that actually interested me instead of taking those that other people thought i should take.

Also, in high school, we read a lot of strange books in English - i mean strange in that they weren't considered the "classics" that all students have to read. In five years of high school, i read 2 Shakespeare plays, and finally read one other in college. I never read anything like "Pride and Prejudice", "Emma", hell i never read "Catcher in the Rye" even. It never occured to me to just read them on my own, though i've been thinking about it now. I never read even half of what Beth has been reading lately.

Sometimes i feel very, very dumb. I know i'm not, but sometimes i just feel that way.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Right now, as I face graduation, I'm regretting big time that I never got off my lazy ass and got an internship. I know they're kind of a liberal arts fad right now, but I missed a big chance to make contacts that could have been very useful in my impending job search.

I also regret not taking dance or music or art classes- I spent all my time taking "serious" classes and, while I enjoyed a lot of them, didn't take most of them for the express purpose of having fun or learning something totally unrelated to my academic focus.

I regret quitting German- I was actually good enough at one point to pass out of my college's four-semester language requirement, but now I haven't taken a German class in three years and I'm losing most of my skills. I do want to speak it again, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to start over.

On the flip side, there are some things I'm proud of:

I'm proud of getting my head out of my ass after my first two years of messing around and mediocre grades. Now I'm doing an honors project, have been on the dean's list the past three semesters, and I'm set to graduate cum laude. I took all that kind of academic acheivement for granted in high school, but now I know what it really means to work hard and earn it.

I'm proud of having ownership of my education. Yeah, my parent's gave me a set sum per year (without which I couldn't have attended a private college), but most semesters I worked between 15 and 25 hours to make ends meet

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Skipping college. Well, I didn't *really* skip it- it just felt like it. For me, college was three years of dashing from work to class (and later on, back to work). It was three years of doing just enough to ask the occassional intelligent question in class (as I needed the goodwill points later on to get slack for missing a test or something due to work). Three years of not knowing a single soul in college beyond a quick hello on the concrete quad (gotta love an urban campus), three years of relying on knowledge gained outside of college rather than learning something new, and three years of a subtley nagging feeling that I'd regret not being able to hang around for the after class philosophy sessions. So yeah, some regrets.

On the flip side, I spent those same three years building a community service infrastructure for Georgia that remains in place today. Three years learning about the best and worst of state, local, and office politics. Three years of seeing hands on solid results in test scores, crime rates, and individual lives.

So really . . . no regrets. Aside from occassionally wishing I could take the time to re-experience the pure metaphysical pleasure of the mental gymnastics my phil program demanded, I'd take making a difference in real life over academia any day.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

I sort of regret not going to one college for four years the way most people do. I love the fact that I lived all over the country and ran a label and a zine and stuff, but when folks who go to one of those four year liberal arts schools and live on campus and have close ties with their profs and other students and get involved with stuff going on at school... I can't help but feel I missed out on something.

I never had the same professor more than once, and I was always working a job AND running my zine with my spare time instead of putting in the extra effort to be an outstanding student. As such I think I may have sort of screwed myself as far as grad school goes.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

I wish I'd not slacked so much in the first two years of high school and completely bombed my GPA. Wish I'd applied for more scholarships so I didn't have to go to a crappy school I hated and then dropped out from. Wish I'd had the drive to actually do my homework and finish my classes. I could have a master's by now. I'd be a freshman if I were even taking classes.

I think that's all.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

My regrets:

In ninth grade I took Latin instead of band because I wanted to take Latin and because, since I was now in high school, I would be back to sharing a music stand with the other worst clarinet playing, one Walter Ellinthorpe. Eighth grade had been great because we were in separate schools. (He was later arrested for sexual assault.) My school only offered one year of Latin, but I never went back to band. I wasn't any good, but everyone should be able to play an instrument.

Also in 9th grade I started the first of a two-year Algebra I for really really mathly inept folks. I was so mortified to be below my level that, to catch up, in 11th grade I took geometry and Algebra II. This was hard, but having both classes in my head that May allowed me to do as well on the math SAT as I did.

In twelfth grade I didn't take French. I can't believe I didn't do this. I had my four years of foreign language for college requirements, but I didn't go for five. Nor did I take French in college, having decided on Russian instead.

Also in 12th grade, fall semester, I took English for UConn credit (we didn't have AP), but I didn't take it spring semester and while I took Economics I didn't take it for UConn credit. If I had taken French and English and Economics I could have started at UConn with a full semester's worth of credits under my belt instead of 3.

As a freshman I took Russian. What a nightmare. I also took a nightmare English course from a completely unintelligible man who professed, with each text, why incest really wasn't so bad. Don Quixote, Candide, Utopia, Notes from Underground, Dora, Thus Spake Zarathrusta. I was unbelievably lost. That spring I was also recovering from mono, taking Russian and lab bio and 8:00 am psych, which all also kicked my ass, plus anthropology, 17 credits and I earned a 1.7, from which my otherwise B-range GPA never recovered.

I continued to coast instead of to push myself in college. I never earned a 3.0 until senior year.

When I was in grad school, I was so loopy, so seriously fucked up, that I accomplished little. I had four incompletes, out of the eight classes; the four grades I had were Bs. In grad school.

That's another reason I returned for the dual BA--I was determined to leave UConn with a 3.0 overall undergraduate GPA.

I left and haven't gone back.

That's about it for today. 'Scuse me while I kick my ass around the block.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

oh dear, lets not go there.

um, how about regretting not just sucking it up and working harder in high school, especially in science classes, since really, I liked science at one point. Choosing my first year of college classes for bad reasons (its possible the approbation of some stupid boy was sort of involved) and not changing them because I was too shy or something...didn't want it to be inconvenient. Not thinking ahead when it was time to write my BA paper and not looking into getting money to do some real primary source research. Not pursuing that elementary school dream of being a reporter (maybe I would have liked it). Totally slacking in that "protest in american history class". Not taking any art history (that is really dumb. art history is cool). Not taking computer programming so I could make some more money right now! oh, there are others too.

Dear Beth: don't worry about the prof. I'm sure he'd be happy to know you are going back to school now. I have also written paper topics on "I am smarter than you even though you are the teacher" and ultimately, lost out. That is what being 13-16 years old is all about. really.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Not taking high school chemistry and physics.

Taking the second quarter of calculus a year after the first quarter.

Getting an English degree instead of a science degree.

Flunking an English Honors class at another university because I didn't want to do the library skills lab book. (I was carrying an A in the class, otherwise.)

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

My one academic regret is trying this quarter to complete the fashion show class when I'm a slow sewer, have three other difficult classes at the same time, and was working 20 hours a week. Not only did I not get done, I spent the entire quarter totally miserable and stressed out even more than I had to be. This just was not the year to try for that, I'm afraid.

However, I also regret not completing the class, because now I can't use that class as a way to get out of taking "Textiles in the Landscape" next quarter, which sounds like the dumbest class in the universe.

And regarding the little girl story, I'd be very surprised if that professor would (a) remember the child in great detail, such as her name, after all these years (heck, profs I had a few years ago can't recall my name), and (b) be able to recognize her as an adult.

I loved the essay title, by the way. I've wanted to write that paper for years, and may just do it last quarter.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

I wish I had learned more about music -- both theory and practice. I'm not very gifted, but there have been so many times in my life that I wished I had the basis to understand why I like what I like, and as many times in my tortured adolescence that I wanted to sit down at a piano or pick up a guitar and play something to set the bad feelings free. I had the opportunity to learn and do more, but I was too blind to how important it would be in life.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Yeesh. Now that i followed the link to TOmato Nation and realized that, out of that giant list, i have read enough to count on one hand...

Well there's one more regret for me. I regret not having read more.

I already know the answer to this, but some please reassure me anyway, 'kay? It's not too late to start being well-read is it? Please?

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

What Dave said, and definitely what Tom said. (See, if I would have paid more attention in school, I could have put that in more eloquent terms.)

As for high school academics. Hee hee haa haa ho ho. I'll have to get a substitute parent for my kids when it comes time to deal with high school academics. As far as I can tell, taking AP classes and otherwise busting your ass academically in high school is a colossal waste of time. Work harder on getting laid and doing stupid things while the consequences are lighter.

(Wait, is my lack of education showing again?)

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Slate's "culturebox" has a similar article. Is there something about March that makes people think they should be better read? In this column, book critics are asked about books they've never read.

http://slate.msn.com/culturebox/entries/01-03-06_101969.asp

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

I'm not sure I agree with the Tomato Nation notion that reading a smattering of each period makes you well-read. Of course, you have to know who Austen is, but is it more important to have read one of her novels or to be able to discuss why Austen is important in literature? You don't have to visit Paris to map it.

The Tomato Nation list reminds me of a basic classical music library that I built one summer vacation in high school. As a backwoods boy I was defensive about not knowing anything about music. My mother had a two-volume encyclopedia of music, and in the appendices was a list of the basics. I got every one out of the local town and college libraries on vinyl, made a tape of the LP, and catalgued them. I listened to each one twice. I read the entries in the music encyclopedia about the works and the authors. And I still didn't know a damned thing about music, because of course I had no theory and no standard for comparing any two works.

There's both more and less to being a learned amateur in any subject than passing once through the basic canon of primary texts/works.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

This is a question it's really easy to be glib and sarcastic over while still being sort of serious. One can either go the responsible route (gee, I wish I had studied harder) or the less-responsible route (I wish I had pulled off even more of the stupid, irresponsible and highly enjoyable weird stunts I did in high school) or even the criminal route (I wish I had pulled a Columbine--heck, 18 students would be a BARE MINIMUM. Three digits or why even bother??) but I think the biggest high-school regret is failing to stand up for myself my first year of high school when getting assigned classes. See, where I went to junior high, the smart kids could take an Algebra class in the 8th grade but had to get better than a C average in order to move on to Geometry in their freshman year of high school. I got C's and as a result got held back and had to repeat Algebra in the 9th grade. At the time, I didn't like it but went along with it. I didn't bother mentioning that those C's were because I excelled at all the tests but didn't turn in enough homework. I didn't mention that I had taken the SAT the year before and scored as high as an average high- school senior (the same test that Xeney took to take those classes at Sac State--as we both discovered years later, we were both in the same Study Skills class 'way back then, but I was too chicken to talk to girls so I didn't meet the xeney until '94 or so.) and could program computers. Instead I got held back--which is the worst thing you can do to a smart kid. Instead of being heavily interested in math and sciences, I got turned off to math and barely squeaked through to Algebra II by the time I graduated (bare minimum to get into college) where my friends (most of whom went straight into Geometry their freshman year) went through pre-calculus. I've been trying to make up for lost time (took Int. Algebra and Trig at the local community college, and hope to take pre-calc next year) but I still feel that I got cheated because I didn't stand up for myself. I don't even want to pass the blame along, as in "that guy fucked me over, maaaan!" I should have told that creepy vice-principal that I wanted geometry and was capable of the work. But the same wimpiness that kept me from talking to girls kept me from talking to vice- principals.

I suppose I should have paid more attention in college but generally my college experience was great enough that I wouldn't want to re-do any of it, even the times involving vomiting, blackouts and jail.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

More than anything in the world, I wish I had graduated from high school instead of dropping out and getting a GED. And I wish so much that I had gone on to college. That is my only regret out of my entire life.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

I dropped out of college. Twice.

Now I'm 28 and still nine and a half classes short of the damn BA I need to go on and get my MLS so I can be a librarian, because I finally got my head out of my ass and realized what I wanted to be when I grow up.

I have to squeeze English classes in around my work schedule, which isn't easy when you work for a woman who thinks the sun rises and sets on a relatively small-time symphony orchestra. Even worse, I have to take classes with 19 year old education majors who ask incredibly stupid questions and make me terrified to ever have children in this area.

And never reading Hamlet may actually be better than doing it three years in a row in high school like I did, because no one in the English department talked to anyone else.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

"Of course, you have to know who Austen is, but is it more important to have read one of her novels or to be able to discuss why Austen is important in literature? You don't have to visit Paris to map it."

You don't, but if you're planning a trip to Paris, who would you rather talk to, someone who's been there or someone who can identify places on a map? Likewise, if you want to be well-read you have to do the actual reading or else your opinions and understanding are all theory and no experience. It's a matter of quality.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

Jetrock, if it makes you feel any better, I was one of those kids that got A's in 8th grade Algebra- but then I failed Geometry. Twice. First time with a 42 and second with a 68.

Proof this.

-- Anonymous, March 06, 2001

I regret not learning how to Write. I was good enough at putting words onto paper to get by, and not much writing was required in Mathematics and Computer Science. But I didn't learn how to Write -- to develop a convincing argument, to write a professional report, to craft an article, and to do all of these quickly and without too much agony. It was many years later that I began taking writing seriously, and finally learning the distinction between drafting and editing, and why you don't want to do both at once.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

One regret: dropping out of college. And it was a community college at that!

I have looked into going back, and it would take approximately four years part-time just to finish my Associate's Degree!

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

The engineering degree. I have no talent for engineering. I hated almost every minute of it. And it was four years of quality learning time lost for any career I might have been good at. OTOH: 4:1 male:female ratio when I was there. No, maybe I don't regret the engineering degree.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

Lucy, at the risk of beating a dead horse, I don't think you quite got my analogy. I certainly would rather get my travel tips from someone who knows Paris from many visits, but I do not want to rely on someone who made one trip to the Louvre and nothing else. In some cases, a quick review of the guidebook will give me more context for the sights of the city than a firsthand report about the Louvre only.

I'm certainly not pooh-poohing the idea that it's nice to read a novel by Austen. I just don't think that having a book by Austen, a book by Twain and a book by Dickens under one's belt makes one well-read.

Let me pick a more humbling example, so you see I'm not putting on airs. I've always been interested in the philsophy of science, and to understand it better I have read some science books written for the layperson -- several each on relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology (or maybe I should say the physics of both small and big things), microbiology, evolutionary theory, and game theory. I think I'm a well-read layperson in the philosophy of science, but that "well-readness" doesn't extend to any of the scienctific fields in which I've read a few books. I remember once, in my early 20s, I had the illusion that it did -- but I had a few embarrassing discussions with my uncle who teaches physics and dabbles in cosmology, which showed me the difference between reading a book and having the context in a field to reach an informed judgment about it.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

I think my biggest regret is not insisting that my high-school English teacher give me a list (like what Sarah has recently done in her article) of the classics I should read. I filled up on thrillers and bubble-gum reading, knowing that I was "supposed to be" reading other things if I really wanted to be a writer, and having no real clue where to start. The English teacher had only said, "read some classics, honey," and then shooed me out. I was too embarrassed to admit I didn't know what she meant by the "classics" and too alone in that pursuit to have anyone else to ask at my very small (and isolated) school. (The same teacher was also our librarian. You can imagine how helpful that was.)

I long for the sort of reading background that Melissa, Dora, Kymm and Beth have mentioned having. (Beth, too, even though she says she can't remember it. [grin]) I crave the day when the kids are more on-their-own and I can read the classics, the children's books, along with histories and biographies. I've tried to squeeze in some of the thigns I missed, but there seems to be way more things I want to read than I'll ever have the time to plow through. (And I also want discussions of this sort of material, putting it in contexts of era / culture, etc., so that I might one day have something of a "big picture.")

(longing sigh)

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

Oddly enough I reget going to college ... at least when I did. As I was finishing high school, I wanted to get a job, save some money, maybe get a car before I went off to college but I'd been told since I was 6 "You're so smart, you're going to go to college and be a famous" whatever I was good at doing at that particular time. So I couldn't let everyone down, could I?

Deep inside I knew I wasn't mature enough or responsible enough for college, and in my sophomore year I started to flunk big-time. Not because I couldn't handle the classwork, but because I just blew them off. I wanted to drop out at that point, go back home, get a job, pay bills, live in the real world and maybe travel the country for awhile but I let people talk me out of it and stayed in school another three years with out finishing my degree. I've since been back to college twice and still haven't finished my bachelor's and don't really have the desire to.

I am doing OK (finally) without it, but I really wish I had listened to myself and just did what I wanted for 3-5 years before really diving into college. I think I would have studied a lot harder and had some great experience to draw on instead of being a naive little dork.

Plus, now it's going to be years before I can afford to travel and do things I'd really like to do and I'm getting old enough I'm not sure I care to do all that anymore.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

My academic regret is not taking advantage of some of the opportunities that I was given. I could have taken some courses at Johns Hopkins over a summer when I was in junior high (I even had to take the SATs to qualify) and I didn't go because I was scared. I kind of wish my mom had made me go.

Also, most of the things others said above -- slacking off, not challenging myself, coasting through classes. Especially my sophomore and junior years of college. I worked harder my senior year of college than all the other years combined -- didn't I get that kind of backwards?

In terms of non-regrets, I do not regret for one minute passing up Cornell to go to a smaller college. Even though my degree isn't as prestigious, I know that I had a much better time. As sheltered as I was going into college, I would have been buried alive at a school as huge as Cornell, not to mention the academic pressure.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

Not having a clearer idea what I'd be doing with my life. I muddled through two years taking a variety of liberal arts courses (which I DON'T regret), and then took a major in journalism.

Journalism, I later learned, is a career field that doesn't need a whole lot of specific instruction. If I could do it over, I'd have majored in history or maybe political science and taken a minor in journalism. I'd still have all the vocational skills I needed, and a much firmer grounding in knowledge that means something.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

Oh where to begin? I regret every class that I tuned out of because I didn't like the teacher - turns out I can't remember the teachers anymore, but I wish I'd paid attention to the material. I regret 'taking a year off' after high school to decide what I wanted to do before starting college - and then getting married like a big idiot to avoid making the decision. I regret that when I did get into school, I got over half way through before realizing that if I had to ever work at the job that my major was training me for (elementary education), I'd poke my eyeballs out within a week, and then having to leave school because of personal crises. I regret that at nearly 40, I STILL have most of my college to do over again and still have personal issues (and minor ones at that) that get in the way - and that at 2 classes a semester I may graduate about the same time my 7 year old does, at which point I'll be too old for it to matter. And I regret that I get so green with envy over the 'grad studies' discussion that I can't even read it.

-- Anonymous, March 07, 2001

Tonight, after work, I stopped by Borders (and I say this with the frequency that most people say, 'After work, I stopped off to buy crack/soda/ham/cigarettes'), and along with Lysistrata (Signet Classics edition - tiny and with a beautiful cover), the Fagles translation of the Odyssey (I remembered that I had read a prose version in high school and that's rather unacceptable - also, it had a nice cover), and a bedside companion for insomniacs called Hello Midnight, I took a spin through the Literary Criticism section and found a delightful tome called Great Books. A 48 year old journalist and alum of Columbia University returns to take the freshman year Great Books course in Literature and Civilization and writes a book about his experience with the books and the academy.

This paragraph, however, was so elegant, so very much on the mark, that I must share it:

"I needed to start work on this book in part because I no longer knew what I knew. I felt that what I had read or understood was slipping away. I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs. The foundations of the building were turning to sand while I sat in the upper balconies looking out at the sea. Feeling the wiggle, I knew I was in trouble. I sensed my identity had softened and merged into the atmosphere of representation, and I couldn't quite see where it ended and I began. My own memories were lapsing out into the fog of media life, the unlived life as a spectator." (p. 15, Great Books by David Denby)

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2001

I regret not taking full advantage of my last year of college. I was an emotional basketcase and took the lightest possible load and changed my major to French because I was coming off of Junior Year Abroad and had French credits coming out my butt and would only need 2 classes to get my piece of paper and get out.

I regret copping out even though, truth be told, I could not handle the schedule that would have resulted in the longed for history degree.

I still want that history degree. I miss studying history. I love history. Wahhhh.

Ahem. So I suppose really that my biggest academic regret is my B.A. Prior to college ... I regret not taking Math in my senior year of high school.

I didn't have to, so I didn't. I should have bit the bullet and taken calculus and physics.

I took Japanese instead and now I can barely remember konnichiwa.

Otherwise, not a single other academic regret. I had fun in school until other things started taking my attention away from it ... like life:)

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2001

I regret letting the jerk who taught my high school calculus class ("Girls can't do calculus!") depress me so much about math that I didn't take another math class all through college. When grad school rolled around and it was time to dust off the calculus and matrix algebra, boy was I one hurting cowpoke. Even though experience suggests I know most of what I need to know, every once in a while I just freeze when I realize there's some gaping hole and I'm going to have to drag myself back to the calculus textbook again.

I realize that this is a petty, petty thing when compared to "I wish I had gone to college" but damn, I wish I'd taken more math. And more language classes. Those would have been handy, too.

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2001

Things I should have done:

Continued in a foreign language, even if it meant retaking a class. (I passed that Spanish class, but no way was I prepared for 4th semester spanish my second semester of college.)

Not going abroad, even to a place where they spoke english.

Not finishing English Historical Linguistics, even the prof (Dobbs, I'm sure she still teaches it, Liz. Tho others adore her.) was more about her own ego than about imparting knowledge to students.

And all kinds of slept with the wrong people/didn't sleep with enough of the wrong people regrets.

-- Anonymous, March 08, 2001

I regret the decision, made at age 23, to get an MFA from Columbia University. I thought at the time that it was going to legitimize my previously spotty education, give me some feeling of Ivy League clout, and generally improve my future career opportunities. Uh-uh. To paraphrase Meghan Daum, who wrote an excellent essay in The New Yorker a while back about her own misguided and idealistic education/career moves, "it was a rich person's decision." I am not a rich person, and never will be: I will be paying back my ever-growing six-figure student loan debt for the rest of my life. Sigh.

-- Anonymous, March 10, 2001

Periwink,

Wow, that Daum quote about the "rich person's decision" struck a chord with me. I'd love to read the article; when you say it was "a while back," was it a loo-o-o-o-o-ng while back? Do I have any chance of finding it online?

I like the "misguided and idealistic" lines. Me too, me too.

Sei

-- Anonymous, March 10, 2001

Academic regrets. My list could be quite long. Let's see . . . I regret focusing more on dating than studying. I regret believing everyone else's opinions about me mattered more than my own. I regret not participating in any extracurricular activities, I regret worrying so much about money and working too many jobs while trying to get through school. I regret that I gave my university grounds to eject me rather than leaving on my own terms. It would have been best for me to take a break, but the fact that my university forced me to do it was devastating.

Now that I'm older, it'll be harder to get through school but I will be more motivated to do well and to learn. It'll be worth it. I want a bachelor's in science, preferably biology. Reading everyone else's academic regrets (which have triggered my own regrets) makes me feel like I can do it. Besides, according to my academic counselor, I can still return to my university. I may just do it.

-- Anonymous, March 10, 2001

Sei, The essay was called "My Misspent Youth" and it was from late October 1999. I think their website is brand-new, but it looks like the essay will be included in this collection: http://www.opencity.org/daum.html  The author seems to be prospering as a freelance writer and left NYC for Nebraska. I suppose I should be encouraged by this. My MFA was in film, not writing. Another regret for another day...

-- Anonymous, March 11, 2001

I regret taking a fun but demanding class (artificial intelligence PERL programming) as a way of diverting my attention from the way my failing marriage was not allowing me to focus on the real work of my doctoral program in math. When I realized I needed to get out of school, I took an incomplete in the class which has since surely turned into an F, and that, more than the aborted graduate degree, is going to get in the way of my going back to UCLA to get a degree in another department altogether.

Damn

-- Anonymous, March 11, 2001

I regret listening to those people who insisted I would find chemistry too difficult because of my math phobia. I took it senior year in high school and maintained an A average. I think if I'd been allowed to catch the science bug earlier, I would have gone on to medical school.

I regret not taking an art history class.

I regret being intimidated enough by my first college French teacher (he threw chairs) that I didn't continue taking French.

I regret being reduced to tears by the complete asshole of an English professor who taught modern American poetry.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2001