Quote Originally Posted by smilingcat View Post
Getting my monthly alumni magazine and seeing many of my classmates and researchers I worked with, have made names for themselves. Me? Got very little to show. Just a membership to local Grange (dying organization with silly secret handshake...) and a farm. Did I deserve an Ivy league education?? Probably not. The magazine makes me feel like a total failure. So these days, the rag goes straight into the recycling bin. DON'T REMIND ME!!!
When they accept you, they don't make you sign a contract to commit to doing anything special after you graduate. If you did the work and earned the credits to graduate, you deserved the education.

I am downwardly mobile, have taken pay cuts and changed careers in order to have a job that makes me happy and get away from the jobs that made me miserable. I'm currently not doing anything related to my major. But I worked hard for my Ivy League degree (and my MS from Northwestern) and I deserved them. What happens to other alumni has nothing to do with me -- whether they're successful or they're in jail (and yes some of the famous ones have gone to jail).

We each have our own version of success, and if it doesn't match up with other's versions or strays from the path we started on when we were young, that's okay.