American Educational System Rant
Okay, so I’ve been in college for two years and I’m going on my third. As I’ve progressed through the educational system I can’t help but feel that I’m being slighted in some way or another. I don’t necessarily mean just my school, but the higher education system as a whole. When I entered college as a freshmen I had a very positive lookout on what my post-grad life would look like. I imagined doing well in college; not completely dominating all of my classes, but graduating with a GPA around a 3.0-3.4 and decent GRE’s. I also imagined generally enjoying most of my classes and seeing their worth as necessary material for the career path I wanted to pursue. Now that I am an upcoming junior I feel that I have tangible image of what I want to be when I graduate. Ideally, I would love to go to Physical Therapy School, get my PTD, work in a hospital or other inpatient facility, and pay off my loans. I believe that these goals are possible, but I honestly completely underestimated how mismanaged and cumbersome the undergraduate educational system has become.
I have always enjoyed science. As a kid I loved learning about different animals, space, and basically just asking questions. Even as I grew older I still held onto a certain adoration for all things scientific. When I entered college I eagerly signed up as a Biology Major. My first two semesters went well. I loved my Biology based courses aka Biological Essentials, Zoology-classes like that. It wasn’t really until my sophomore year until I realized how much muck i was going to have to wade through in order to get out of college alive, and almost more importantly in todays’ world: gain experience for a career. Now at this point I had some vision of where I wanted to go in life. I started off wanting to be a Marine Biologist but after doing some research I found the job market for this kind of field wasn’t very big and even with a PhD didn’t pay as much as I would of thought. After meeting with my schools career center I realized that Physical Therapy was the field I wanted to go into. This is where it starts to get frustrating. Welcome to the world of Gen Eds and Irrelevant Courses. I would say that more than half of my classes have little or nothing to do with what I want to do as a career. I understand that it is a great skill to be a well rounded person but why does the school have to decide that for me? I want to be a physical therapist. If I want to be a renaissance man, I’ll pick up a book when I feel like it. Right now I need experience that will help me get a job. I don’t need to be able to recite sonnets or solve anti-derivatives. Even some of the classes for my major I feel are completely useless and will not help me in the long run. I understand that chemistry plays a huge role in the human body, but how much do I really need to understand in order to become a physical therapist? It’s not even a question of how much I need to learn. It is more of a question of relevance. Sure acid-base titrations are great, so is the isolation of limonine using dry ice, but it literally will not help me at all with my desired future career. There is no specificity in classes like this either. You jump from one loosely connect chapter to the next. I also find it difficult to enjoy sitting in class, when I know the material that I spend the next week studying like crazy for will have no use to me in the future. The only reason I study is so I can keep my GPA up high enough to get into PT school, not because I really like any of my courses. I shadow at a physical therapists office every Thursday, and I feel that I’ve started to get a general feel of what it might be like to work in that profession. I’m not going to need half of the classes I’ve had to tack onto my major because somewhere along the line some school administrator thought that these would be helpful courses for somebody wanting to work in the health profession.
The college experience needs to be streamlined. I know way too many people, and many of them my friends, that have graduated with a worthless degree. I’m not saying that their area of study is worthless, all I am saying is that their formal education in college has literally done nothing for them. I’m not talking about english, art or any other majors notorious for post-grad unemployment (sorry) but majors in pyschology, business and hard sciences. People wonder why America’s job market is in decline and why we have money troubles. I think we’re looking one of the biggest issues in the face. Our college grads aren’t getting the jobs they need. Now they owe the schools thousands of dollars and don’t have the jobs to pay them off because their degree is worthless in the job market. I’m beginning to feel like the undergraduate college experience only exist to see who can hang around. I’m serious. I would say that only a quarter of the classes that I’ve taken will be relevant to what I want to do in life. I feel like i’m watching the end of the Shawshank Redemption: Crawling through a tunnel of shit to eventually be free. Just saying.
Noisy Interactive Posters by DM9DDB
(Source: meme4u)
(Source: meganpastiche)
such a good song.
(Source: desertjedi)
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash by Giacomo Balla, 1912
REALISTIC PORTRAIT OF WIENER DOG IS REALISTIC
Blues Brothers
