Why are we at college?

Why are you here?  College isn't necessary to be successful.  You can learn anywhere.  What do you hope to accomplish? 

Let’s be honest with ourselves and put something on the table immediately. The entire point of going to college is to make ourselves look better on paper. We take classes in which we don’t give full effort to learn information we will forget. The one thing we are paying all this money for is a single line on our resume that says Bachelor’s Degree in whatever the hell our 18-year-old selves decided. Every student here is looking for one thing: a career. Biology majors are looking to become doctors, engineering majors are looking to create an invention, English majors are looking to be famous writers, and art majors are looking to be working at McDonalds. That last one is a joke, but you get the point. Even if we learn nothing from our time here, the most important thing we walk away with is the ability to tell our future employer that we have a four-year degree from an accredited university. During my summer internship at Orbital ATK, I learned more in three months about how to be an engineer than I have in the three years I have spent at University of Missouri- Kansas City. (Yes, I spelled that out instead of UMKC to increase my word count. Insert winky face here.) In that internship, I have worked with my fellow engineers to solve problems and write procedures for people whose point of view is different than mine. It sounds easy, but people who have been working there for 30+ years don’t like to listen to a 21-year-old engineer who has been working there for three months. You have to establish communication skills and people skills over time to get through to them. These are things I did not learn in college. I learned these from years at Party City, which has absolutely nothing to do with my career. The point I am making is the skills to have a successful career doesn’t come from college, it comes from life experiences. They should have a degree on life, with classes about taxes, mortgages, babies, investing, changing my oil, etc. Those are things I really wish I knew about by now. On the other side, some may argue that college teaches us hard work, meeting deadlines, or looking up key information. Do we really need to pay $20000 to learn how to handle those? I should start my own college only teaching people how to manage stress. Honestly, I have a hard time remembering what classes I took freshman year, let alone what I learned in them. We forget the information or we never use it again. I took calculus 1,2, and 3. Every engineer I have ever spoken too says they never used calculus again. Did I waste my time? Not if I get the words on my resume. In the end, I want to have a career, to have a successful life in my parents’ eyes, to have my own family with a nice house and white pickett fence, and to have a nice retirement in Hawaii. We used to call it the good ol’ American Dream. Isn’t that what everyone wants?

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