What if you asked someone to describe, in their own words, what college means for a student and they relayed to you the fact that the college experience is simply “...Perseverance and willingness to conform to a prevailing culture…”? How do you feel about that? Is that what the wording on the degrees should say or what the name on the ‘graduates list’ or the ‘honors’ represent? Columnist Steven Pearlstein pointed out in Is College Worth It? how grim all of that indeed sounds. I agree.
It is quite a sad collection of words -- a sad question over such a phrase -- to attach to what’s supposed to be an inspiring period that helps prepare you for diving into the career. Remember, our time in college is supposed to be an inspiring period. I put stress on the “supposed to be” part. A truth is that the overall college experience, interactions with faculty, staff, other students, capabilities within courses, fees, specific experiences are not always inspiring. Sometimes our incubation period, the period that is supposed to prepare us for success in a given field of work, gets downright depressing.
It’s hoped that when we seek out ways to get back on track if a degree is indeed what we still want, we won’t be given the ‘run-around’ by the college with which we choose to associate ourselves. It’s hoped that no matter which major we choose that we’ll have professors that are into retention of information and are passionate and knowledgeable about the fact that ‘one size does not fit all’ in the way students learn.
As a student, I want to experience the types of inner-workings that aren’t apparent in some of the unbelievably costly classes, books, (sans other fees that are tacked onto my bill): I want to meet the educators that long to provide the type of support that they wish they received during their college years.
Another thing I’m partial to is how worth it all of the college difficulties become when you have a diverse population in that school. The reason I feel diversity in the school’s census is so important is that I think it increases one’s whole learning capacity. You’d learn to be aware of and eventually seek out a bevy of ideas, lifestyles, work ethics, developed and developing minds in education different from your own. It becomes more worth it when the college at least tries to mimic an actual ‘world’.
A ‘world’ isn’t some automatically one-sided, bland, close-minded place, but an array of interesting people, places, and things. I hope to learn all that I can beyond Powerpoint presentations and standardized tests. I’m trying to figure out who I am in this environment and what I’ll become when I leave this environment.
