On Sunday, 22 January 2012 at 01:17:21 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructiona...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:mvloclloufauudewj...@dfeed.kimsufi.thecybershadow.net...
First off, they required all the first year students
to live on campus. WTF. And, of course, they required
these exorbitant fees for all that too.
At BGSU, they required first *and* second year students to live
on campus. They had some sort of bullshit excuse about
"bettering yourself" or some other such meaningless crap like
that.
But that's not the bad part: There was one year (that I *know*
of) where they had more first and second year students then
they had dorms for. Obviously, they couldn't do the sane thing
and relax the requirement (after all, that might make BGSU look
bad!), so they made a bunch of students (not me, luckily)
*live* together in the dorm's lounge rooms. That was one of
first of many "College, WTF?!" moments for me. (I had thought
Animal House was fiction!)
Best of all, I have my own bathroom and kitchen. And it's
quiet here, pretty much all day and all night. I live next
to a fire station, and it's infinitely more quiet
than living next to college drunkards.
And even in the dorms, you still get the middle-of-the-night
fire alarms anyway (speaking of drunks). But in the place you
have, I bet you don't have to leave the house every time it
happens...
The classes are OK, but the other crap they *required*
just gets a huge HELL NO.
I was...sort of...the other way around (kinda):
There was admittedly a lot about campus life that was terrible,
but there was also a lot about it that I loved and still
sometimes miss (Many intangibles, but also the panini
sandwiches at the campus convenience store! Yum! Much as BGSU
sucked, they *did* have very good dining halls as long as you
avoided anything resembling asian).
Even though there were a *few* very good teachers/classes, it
was mostly the academic (and administrative, financial and
bureaucratic) aspects I had a problem with. Oh, and the drunks,
of course.
Aaanyway, I did round two at the community college,
and switched to computer science figuring an AS in
computers is probably more useful than in physics,
and is something I should be able to turn around
quickly.
And that wasn't bad at all. Government grants paid
for the whole thing (for three semesters... I had
already eaten a huge chunk of them in year 1) and
I could live wherever I wanted.
I might be ok with finishing that off someday if my
business crashed and burned (and nobody took my years
of experience as a substitute for college), but
since the free money ran out, even the three or
four grand they'd want to finish it off just doesn't
look worth it.
Heh, I finished off with community college, too!
I started college (in 2000) with 2.5 years at BGSU (public
party school, and in retrospect, the *best* of all the colleges
I've been to, not that that's saying much). I had an absolutely
terrible apartment situation the last semester (Lesson: *Never*
get into a student-oriented apt complex with management that's
based out-of-state. Especilly if it's leased by anything longer
than month-to-month.)
So then I transferred to JCU (private school, highly-respected,
at least locally) so I could commute and save on living
expenses. Was there for 1.5 years, retaking all the same CS
classes I had already aced at BGSU (because JCU didn't believe
I could possibly know what I was doing - I was merely a
"student" after all - and an "undergrad" at that). Although it
was technically 1.5 years, the last semester I was so jaded I
was really only there physically; I wasn't actually trying at
all, and I didn't care to. So they did put me on a one-semester
academic suspension, but it didn't matter since I was already
done with them by that point anyway. (It was somewhere in the
middle of my time at JCU that I decided I genuinely *wanted* to
not have a degree. I know that sounds like a rationalization to
most people, but I swear it really isn't one for me.)
At that point I went to the super-cheap[1] local Lakeland
Community College part time, mainly so I could keep the ~$100k
(yes, that's right) I'd racked up in loans out of repayment
until I could actually pay them (for the record: I still can't
:/ ). At the first two schools, I had been declared CS all four
years from day one. Did it differently at LCC: *Officially*, I
was going for...I think it was some sort of EE associate's or
something like that, but really I took the opportunity to *for
once in my life* actually take the classes that *I wanted* to
take[2]. I even took an acting class that I absolutely loved;
heck, it was the only class in my life I was genuinely sad to
see end (and then I took a second one that...umm...didn't work
out so well...)
That community college is very highly regarded locally, and I
was fairly impressed with it - at first. Then the staff,
administrators, and one or two very specific instructors, kept
finding all manner of new and creative ways to severely fuck me
over. Eventually their demands got *so* unreasonable, and their
bullshit *so* deep, that I just said "Fuck it, I'm done." That
was probably about six-ish years ago. Things haven't been easy
since (Hah! Like they ever were!), but I've never had a hint of
regret about leaving. I have, however, had many regrets about
having ever gottn involved in the first place. And I've also
had many regrets about having listened to the people who talked
me into not cutting my losses much sooner than I actually did.
("You've already gotten this far, you may as well get something
out of it!" Yea, *thanks*, all you self-righteous assholes, now
my debt is double what it would have been.)
[1] That's "super-cheap" relatively speaking: it's still
insanely expensive (and less effective) compared to a good
library. Or even a good bookstore.
[2] That was one of the many things I despised about college. I
had always been told that in college, unlike high school (which
made my miserable college experience seem like utopia by
comparison) you choose your area of study. But that turned out
to be a load of crap - unless you go to a tech school, 65%-75%
of credits are completely unrelated to your major and it's
*dictated* that you take them. (Academically, college literally
*is* an expensive redo of high school). Now, I might have not
minded the lack of self-direction, except that *I* was the one
paying tens of thousands of $$$ for the classes! Who the fuck
has ever heard of, say, a grocery store that told people which
of their stock they could and couldn't buy? *Everyone* in
faculty/staff thought I was nuts for seeing it that way. In
their mind, you're *expected* to be happy paying them a fortune
for the privilege of being told what you're allowed to learn.
Talk about narcissism.
