College was a rough time for me. Intellectually, the first two semesters were awesome. Nothing else about the experience lived up to my expectations. I would be tempted to say that there wasn’t really even one single highlight in my life while I was there.The third semester was the worst. It started in Chemistry.The only blemish on my grades from the first semester came from a Teaching Assistant that felt the need to flaunt her power. In spite of straight A’s on exams and perfect results in labs, she gave me an F in for the 20% of my grade that she controlled. She felt that I didn’t participate enough.Somehow, I got stuck with her in the second semester as well. She didn’t have any suggestions on how to improve my performance to improve my grade. I had perfect attendance in her class reviews, I did all of the homework, and I even asked questions. She still felt the need to give me an F.In the third semester, I switched from General Chemistry to Organic Chemistry. Unbelievably, she was the Assistant Professor for that class, and she had control of 50% of my grade. She let me know on Day One that I was going to fail. I tried to move to another class, but I couldn’t find anything that fit in my schedule with my other classes.The trouble continued in Computer Programming. On the first day of class, the professor informed us that he graded on a strict Bell Curve. I shouldn’t have had any worries, Ankara escort but I didn’t know I was in a class full of geniuses.With the final approaching, I had perfect attendance and a 98% average for exams and homework. I should have been proud. Instead, I was at the bottom of the bell curve. Even with a perfect exam score, I was likely to get a D in the class.I had similar problems in Calculus and Electronic Circuit Fundamentals. My GPA was going to take a hit that was going to make me miserable.If the problems had ended there, I might have been okay. They didn’t.I am the middle child of five. My parents were struggling to help three of us in college. The oldest had it easy. She was getting a degree in Music Education. There must have been a big demand for that, because she got all kinds of financial support. I couldn’t tell you how my older brother paid for school. He didn’t have good grades, and he drank a lot. Somehow, he got better scholarships than our sister.I, on the other hand, could not get anyone to give me a dime. I worked three summer jobs, saved almost every penny, took out big student loans, and it still wasn’t enough. My parents really wanted to help, but there wasn’t much there, either. I managed to pay for the third semester, but I barely had half of what I needed for the fourth.My mom had the best useless advice ever: Get a girlfriend. Ankara escort bayan Her idea was that a girlfriend would be the incentive I needed to find a way to overcome the intellectual and financial problems. It would have been good advice, except I wasn’t having any better luck with girls than I was with my other problems.Girls shouldn’t have been a problem, but they were.I had dated a girl in High School. She taught me to kiss properly. We both knew that she wasn’t a virgin, and I rather expected her to let me go all the way eventually. For some reason, she broke up with me before that ever happened. She claimed that I was too nice of a guy, and she didn’t want to corrupt me.I sort of started dating another girl just as I left for college. A few months later, she broke up with me, but she didn’t bother to let me know. Her parents wouldn’t let her talk on the phone, so we sent a lot of letters back and forth. Her final letter to me was a postcard with a quote from an Eagles song. Of course, I should have known that she was already gone.I was starting to think there might be something wrong with me.It occurred to me that I was at a college, surrounded by ten thousand co-eds, and not a single one of them knew my name. I tried to change that. There was this girl that lived in the same dorm tower that I did, and I would see her several times a week on Escort Ankara the elevator. I ran into her once at the library, and I tried to start a conversation. She shushed me. I asked her if she would meet me outside. She glared at me and said, “Go away!”I really knew something was wrong with me.The universe wasn’t done messing with me, either.As the end of that miserable third semester started to wrap up, I saw an opportunity to hopefully make nice with a girl. Our dormitory tower was divided into “houses” of two floors each. Men and women were segregated by floors, and each house had a floor of each. Our house organized a Secret Santa program and asked for everyone to sign up.If things worked out, I would spend the last week before finals buying little gifts for a girl, and some other girl would spend the same week buying little gifts for me. With that much-shared attention, there had to be something of a chance to meet a girl and get to know her.Things didn’t work out. More guys had signed up than girls, so after all of the girls had drawn names, the extra guy names were dumped in with the girl’s names for us to draw. Of all the useless, messed up things that the universe could have dumped on me, when I drew a name, I got my roommates name.Well, strike one against me. I laughed, and made sure he didn’t know, and I did a good job of misleading him so that he thought one of the women was leaving the gifts.Maybe it was because if that misdirection that I noticed that I was being misdirected as well. In fact, by the middle of the week, I was fairly certain that either my roommate or one of the guys he hung out with was my Secret Santa. As far as I was concerned, that was strike two.