It may sound silly, but I can easily say PE2K has helped me a lot. RPing and fan fic writing has made writing college essays EASY considering all that writing has helped me learn and use a whole spectrum of vocabulary words and writing methods to make an ordinarily boring subject much more interesting to read. Writing that Pokémon fan fiction, Trial of Juno, took 500+ pages, single spaced, so an essay assignment of writing just 10 or so double-spaced pages was laughably easy as cheese. In fact, the only real thing that slowed me down was having to do research, find references, and cite sources. The actual writing part was a breeze.

Also, when I first came to PE2K, my graphic art skills were garbage. Really, they were. Time, practice, and dedication to get better like the creations of other people I came across helped me improve my skills, and yes, I used those same skills to create nice graphics and quality presentations for my grad school classes. It made boring Powerpoints have a lot more quality to them and made getting A's easy. I'm sure some day I'm going to need to make office presentations, and yes, I'm very confident graphic and presentation skills are going to help a lot. It's WAY easier to present something that you feel good about how you created it than sheepishly stepping up to the podium worrying how people might think of it!

This community has also made me a bit more social. Before, my gosh, I was such an introverted loner. Almost to the point of being scary! You guys helped me step out of my shell, express myself, share feelings and experiences, and generally made it easier to talk to people. And so I found this was the case with people in real life, so usually all it takes is just a little stepping forward and sharing your feelings and thoughts with other people and asking for their insight. You guys have also showed me that adding in a little dash of humor here and there makes it MANY times easier for other people to open up to you and feel safe about sharing their experiences.

TL:DR - Time spent being a part of this community was NOT wasted. Quite the contrary. :)