I think for me it helped working in languages such as Julia which is LISPlike but with more normal syntax.

Especially for a lot of us doing OOP style programming, it takes time to get used to a very functional oriented language irrespective of syntax.

About college. It seems to me that LISP rarely works for people in college. I have come to suspect that you need to get familiar with normal clunky languages first. Only then can you appriciate the beauty of LISP afterwards.

I know I totally dismissed LISP in college. Nor did I really see the point of functional programming despite learnign standard ML (OCaml like language).