How do you cope with having gone to a lower status university

File: 1372672232120.png (96KB, 332x333px) Image search: [Google]

96KB, 332x333px

How do you cope with having gone to a lower status university than you could've handled and doing a subject you didn't like and not being able to change due to being in the UK and being aged 24 knowing you have never done anything intellectual in your life? And having practically given up on your degree with over a year to go, handing in the absolute minimum to get a 2.1 (acceptable in the UK)?

Feels awful man. When I go through stuff in my own time, whether it's academic or not, I feel awful. Learning PHP is trivial. Learning maths for physical sciences (my uni missed out tonnes of stuff) is trivial. The exercises in SICP are trivial. I don't mean that I am finding everything easy- I mean that if I do this stuff it is not an achievement in any way like a MMath from Cambridge or a research paper in a scientific journal or creating a programming language or framework would be.

I'm implementing stuff in Lisp from SICP when Turing was literally inventing the theory behind computer science. Learning PHP is easy but I haven't done anything near as smart as the guy who created PHP (and the guy who created JavaScript did it in about a week!).