I know I need a degree, but in what?

I feel like engineering is really hard, so I guess my first piece of advice would be to get better study habits.

I'm thinking about electrical engineering because from what I've heard from two friends who are both electrical engineers, the salary straight out of school with a decent (>3.5) GPA is somewhere between $40,000-50,000 USD (with room for growth several years down the road) and that the actual workload is rarely more than 50 hours/week. I've got a EE degree. You know what I learned to call the kids who got into engineering for the above reasons ? Washouts. I went to a fairly highly regarded engineering school and the EE program had a washout rate of close to 70%. The reason for this is that you need to love doing EE work. Love love love it. If you don't love it, you will fail, because it is hard and boring and nobody except true engineering dorks likes the subject enough to suffer through it. And you have to master so many things before you can even begin to do the most basic and simple stuff. If you love the idea of making EE money, then go to business school. You'll work less hard for better money, and the women are both hotter and more numerous. The kids who did well in engineering loved the subject. The ones who didn't love it washed out or suffered through it long enough to get a degree in engineering and a job in sales. Now, look, I'm not trying to be a douche - I barely graduated from high school, got kicked out of the marines and knocked up a stripper by the time I was your age, so I know what screwing up your early 20s smells like. I didn't even make it to college until I was 32. But the only reason I made it through the engineering program is because sitting through 3 semesters of fields and waves was unmitigated awesome for me. Also, an EE program is very heavy on theory. It is pretty much all you will do. There will be some projects and other hands on stuff - in third and fourth years - but the main goal is to generally prepare you for further training wherever you get a job at. If you aren't self motivated enough to train yourself to some large degree, this can leave you wholly unprepared to do anything useful when you graduate. Based on what you've said here, I think you should take a couple years to work and save up money. This will be a good marker as to how committed you are to the idea and the extra money will make it easier to focus on your studies*. Maybe get an take some classes or get an associates in electronics/music production from a community college. Good luck, whatever you decide. *my grades really suffered because I had a kid and had to work through college. If I had it all to do over again, I probably would have worked less - but my relatively low debt at graduation was a nice benefit - so maybe not. Point is, if I had more money when I started, it would have been much better.

Also, I've completed Calculus I, II, and III with A's in all of them. I hated math until I started calculus.This changes everything. Go look up the EE101 texts that your local classes use. Buy 'em, and start working the problems. Continue on with your calc. If you can grok integration, differentiation and differential equations then just dive deep and learn as much as you possibly can and you will end up sailing through classes. The intro EE classes are often giant seminars with a ton of students. Don't expect any help from the professor, and don't be surprised if the TAs only know the material a little better than you do. You can absolutely teach yourself, and then sail through the intro courses if you already understand how calculus works. Don't rule out Oregon - the cost of living will be lower than in Seattle or the Bay Area and the education will still be solid. There are a bunch of boutique pedal companies in Portland, so you might be able to do some part time work while you study. ABSOLUTELY DO INTERNSHIPS! I can't stress this hard enough. If you want to graduate with a job, do an internship EVERY SUMMER. If your school has a 5-year co-op program with pre-packaged internships, that's even better. Finally, quit the weed now, but do it slowly. Get into exotic tea or espresso instead. Engineers love caffeine. (They also often love weed, but you need to become a studying machine before you start hitting the bong again. Who knows, weed might even be legal by the time you graduate)

The paradox of disciplines like EE or CS is that they are hard as hell AND you can teach yourself. The paradox is resolved by understanding that these disciplines are so hard that coursework can only guide you towards understanding the subject. You have to put in a lot of work to really understand the subject yourself. So much that the lectures themselves don't take much time or effort by comparison. So the kind of person who will be successful in an EE or CS program is also the kind of person who can succeed without the program, because fuck it: they will teach themselves. That's also why people who succeed at such programs are in high demand and earn paycheck a few standard deviations away from a median income. If you can graduate with a decent GPA from an EE or CS program, a hiring manager can be reasonably confident that you can be thrown at a tough problem and just kind of figure it out. Designing guitar pedals is easy, by comparison. Designing digital algorithms that simulate vintage pedals is the hard stuff. For more on simulating old FX units, check out the http://valhalladsp.wordpress.com/. Valhalla's focus is mostly on classic digital reverb units, but Sean gives a lot of insight into the process of analyzing those units and figuring out how to create similar effects in software.

Variations on 'kicked out of school' come up semi-frequently, and sometimes there is a bit of a pile-on re. what have you done to ensure you're not going to mess up in the exact same way again? Often for very good reason, often from people who have been there (I wasn't kicked out, but I left, and went back later, and I was a totally different student). I was friends with lots of engineering students of various stripe in uni, and engineering is a demanding program. Kicked out twice + two years with what you describe does not make it sound like going straight into a challenging program is what you want to rush into right now. Unless you are leaving stuff out about "and saw my therapist weekly and discussed what led me to do things that I knew would see me booted, and made changes in my personal life that make me confident I've changed and can get a great GPA." Are you sure you can even get back in at this stage? You might have to pull off a few semesters at a community college with good grades before that's a possibility. And college would be a good way to test out where your academic habits are now.

Also, you might consider taking a course that you have absolutely no interest in at your local community college and then force yourself to get an A+ in that class. Just prove to yourself that you can do it.

(Slowing the weed habit down to weekends only, or even less than that is also a really good idea, but you probably don't want to hear that.)

MIT has recently started trialling an online course system called 'MITx' - at the moment they only offer one course, https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/. You can read about it http://www.metafilter.com/111068/Ivy-Level-Educationwith-no-debt. If I were you I'd sign up for the course, and go through the lectures and assignments. If you find it interesting, enjoy studying it, and complete it with a good grade you'll be well prepared for university. If you find it boring/that it isn't for you, better to know that now than to drop out after spending thousands of dollars. Seconding b1tr0t's suggestion of internships.

Go get an EE or CS degree and find a job in a field that is hiring, and you can make $50k+ easy. Then do music stuff for fun on the side. Don't think it's this easy. I have very similar interests to yours. When I got my full-time programming job, I thought I could build modular synths on the side. But the programming job uses up my mental engineering energy. Figuring out why my circuit isn't making any sound doesn't seem as fun after I spent all day figuring out why my multithreaded C++ program is locking up.