I'm really struggling in the University courses. But I try hard these days and things are slowly making sense. I may not be getting better marks yet but my inner voice says "I want to try again and again and again". Almost all of the time I think of the problems in class, about ways to get better at it. Instead of being lazy and sleeping in free time when I was developer, these days I wake up suddenly at night and start looking at the algorithms. However, research has consequences. I don't think I will be a very good researcher and would be able to secure grants in future as others do because I do not have good academic record. But I have to make money because I started my life from scratch and have gone through a lot of financial hardship to get here.

Now, I'm not sure if research is really my passion and if I should go ahead or should I fall back to developer to live financially better life.

Has anyone gone through this situation?