The first thing I do when I get into my car after a school day is let out the loudest curse word I can.

I spend my day boxed up in my brain with my headphones in, blocking everything else out so that I can crank out whatever written content I need for this class or that. Swearing or singing along to the radio is my way of sort of reminding myself that I'm a real person, of shoving myself out of my own thoughts. In my case, this "getting stuck inside of my mind" is a psychiatric problem called depersonalization, but milder forms of it are all over the place. I like to think of it as the opposite of mindfulness.

College culture and the University of Minnesota especially has created a high-stress, overstimulating environment that fosters this "opposite of mindfulness" mentality. How else can you survive here without devoting three-quarters of your free-time outside of class to school? How can you even afford to take care of yourself? It's so stressful that we have to shut off the emotional side of our brains in favor of finishing our tasks so we can show somebody how hard we're working and what good students we are.

It's just like high school, especially with STEM majors. You learn the material so quickly that you don't have time to appreciate it or even really understand it because that test is looming and you have to know, not learn.

I've had only one professor and one class challenge this mentality.

I got instructor permission to skip a prerequisite and got put into a class called "Community Journalism." It's basically 10 undergraduate students trying to make a news site and an instructor who makes sure it all goes off without a hitch. I remember her telling us when we got stuck around generating story ideas to let go of our obsession with producing "widgets" (the final product, in this case, the story) and to instead relax, step back and work on even more preliminary steps in the process.

She is flexible with deadlines, open to class input and, above all, lets us flail around a little bit so we learn how to get ourselves out of a hole. We don't have to worry about our grades suffering from it because we all already care about this project for the sake of caring about it. It's an environment where learning, not stress about a ranking, comes first.

I have learned more about reporting from this class than almost any other.

All of this begs the question--is the rest of the college education system really teaching students what it should? Is pushing tight deadlines on kids who have barely scratched the surface of adulthood really the way to teach them how to function? Where does a "love of learning" ever come into this equation?

I don't have the answers. What I do know is that this is a question for professors and students, alike.