So seeing as I’m just a few credits shy of graduating I thought I would start a thread about things in college that people find aggravating or that could be changed. This isn’t so much “there’s too much work”, as that’s to be expected in college, but things that irked you that you thought wouldn’t be an issue, or things in the front office that could be changed, habits of professors or students etc. This isn’t meant to be so serious, just things that were mildly aggravating.
I always found it exceptionally irritating when someone in class asked the professor a question that could clearly be found in the syllabus. Ex.) “How much is this upcoming test worth to our grade?”, or, “What day is the exam?”. Gee, I don’t know, maybe look at that sheet of paper you got on the first day of class that outlines every assignment and every day of class for the whole semester.
It still upsets me when people will go on forever with a ridiculous question or statement that is either obvious or inapplicable and will waste time from those who do want to learn. Like they just go on a rampage on some minuscule topic that will not be covered on a test and everyone is just staring at the professor and the student having the conversation hahahaha
One of my professors made the homework due before he had taught us the relevant material, for the first half of the semester. That was pretty annoying.
Also people who talk during class. I get being bored – I’m on my phone sometimes too – but for Pete’s sake don’t do it in a way that ruins the experience for everyone around you.
The professors and TAs that are condescending or otherwise just assume people know as much about the material as they do. I thankfully only had this happen a couple times, but seriously…we’re here to learn, if we already knew this stuff we wouldn’t be in the class!
People who hog class time. If you happen to have a lot of good questions with maybe an occasional trivial question in there, I don’t mind and if anything appreciate you. But if you’re asking a bunch of trivial questions and interrupting the professor to do it, you’re annoying. This also applies to people who keep making unnecessary comments that distract the class. I don’t mind an occasional small distraction, but seriously don’t start doing it every class or making a big scene.
People not taking initiative or not taking academics seriously. I didn’t care about this unless it actually affected me though. If you want to stay in your room all day sleeping and watching Netflix but aren’t bothering people who are focusing on school, fine. But once you start bothering the people who are focusing on school and making it obvious that you don’t care in the meantime, I’m annoyed.
Case in point: One of my freshman year roommates was only there because her parents made her go to college. She didn’t take her academics seriously at all, while me and my other roommate very much did. She’d party just about every night, come in in the middle of the night on a weeknight at various levels of intoxication to turn the lights on and be loud with her friends, watch Netflix without headphones in the middle of the night while the rest of us were trying to sleep…and then she’d yell and literally stomp her feet at us for our class alarms waking her up, because “you should just skip like I do, school isn’t important anyway”. Yeah no, your bad decisions are entirely your own, not ours. The good news is those kinds of people don’t tend to last past their first year. Said roommate is a perfect example.
There’s always that one student you’d find in every lecture that would manage to ask an extremely verbose and nonsensical question to prove to the class that they’re intelligent. In reality, it’s just irritating to hear someone reiterate something the professor just said so they “stick out” as a student. This is just a minor tick of mine, but it’s something that came up way too often.
((I just read the previous comments and noticed someone wrote the same thing as me. I’m so glad I’m not alone in this.))
One thing that annoys me both now as a grad student and annoyed me as an undergrad are the people who feel the need to use purposely high academic words and name drop authors without context or explaining their arguments.
Yes, I get it, you’re good at memorization but you don’t look any smarter than if you used a word that normal mortals use. In fact, as an instructor, I’m way more impressed if you can take a complicated argument and distill into a blurb that your classmates can better understand.
I go to a commuter school that doesn’t have on-campus residence halls; the overwhelming majority of students commute, and many have 1+ hour long commutes, while a few live in nearby apartments. Part of the appeal of my particular school is that it caters to non-traditional students to a degree that other nearby colleges do not. As a result of being a public commuter university, the school is quite cheap - less than 13k a year, a fraction of what it costs at other universities just a few miles away.
Yet, each and every year, I hear students (usually first year students) complain about not getting the “college experience” as though the University is in anyway obligated to cater to the fantasy so many students have about what college is “really” like - i.e. an image heavily influenced by the media. No one forced you to come here, no one put a gun to your head and said “DEPOSIT OR ELSE.” If you wanted to party it up like you’re at Arizona State, you could’ve gone to Arizona State. (Not to disparage ASU, it’s an excellent school!) If you’re upset that so many of your friends don’t stick around campus all day because they have to commute back home, you shouldn’t have gone to a school where everyone commutes.
I also think there’s a level of complacency - one’s college experience is largely what one makes of it; despite being a commuter campus, my school still offers an extensive study abroad program (and substantial funding for it,) along with sports teams, clubs, honor societies, and so on. Freshman come here, see that the school doesn’t perfectly mesh with what they wanted college to be like, and then they just mope around for four years and whine about how it sucks. They don’t transfer and they refuse to make any effort to get involved.
There are certain people that have a sense of superiority over people that didn’t go to college
People asking for grade changes because they think they “deserved” a higher grade than they got
Greek organizations that look down upon other students and organizations… tiers? seriously? ugh it seems so artificial and honestly worse than some high schools.
Yik yak. Although it can be incredibly funny and is a great place to vent, it can be a toxic environment sometimes, especially with people who abuse it.
Laundry. Can’t wait until I have my own place.
Meal plans could use some more diversity
People who cannot respect their roommates or hallmates and will be blasting loud music at ungodly hours
People who cannot properly take care of communal spaces
Professors that think their class is the only class that you are taking
@shawnspencer - Yik Yak died out really quickly at my school (after a couple of semesters of popularity) so now there’s maybe 20 yaks a day - my friends and I have decided to take advantage of the slow feed by flooding it with dank memes. Now our Yik Yak is literally just the four of us. It’s great. (But I completely agree with your statement - when Yik Yak was big here, people used it to attack other students and it was awful.)
The cockroaches in the laundry room and the ants in the bathroom were pretty annoying, though maybe that was more an issue of my dorm than college in general.
And likewise, the professors that do this and then use it as justification to give you way too much work, or way too difficult work.
This reminds me: Professors that give difficulty estimates for assignments based on how long it would take them to do the assignment, not a student who is just learning the material.
Tip for any incoming freshmen reading this thread: Take professor’s time and difficulty estimates for assignments and exams with a grain of salt until you get a good feel for the class. They don’t always estimate well. Alternatively, talk to people who have already taken the class with that professor and ask about the assignment length and difficulty to get an idea of how realistic the professor is being.
Apparently a couple of the suites in my dorm area had mice problems in my year, though I never personally saw any. And most of my floor wound up with an ant infestation because of a couple messy neighbors who didn’t take their trash out enough. It’s definitely not something they mention on the tours! I’d agree that it’s probably more dependent on the dorm and the residents that year though.
i get a bit annoyed at how our school’s website (CCC) advertises that we have a speech and debate team, all of these different clubs, and so on. yet there are no links to get more information on how to join or when they meet or anything! i honestly have never seen these clubs around and don’t even think we have a real speech and debate team at the moment. i dont doubt we ever had one! but it’s advertised as if you can just join the school and have all these wonderful opportunities to attend all these diverse and interesting clubs and activities and really they just haven’t updated their club list in years and let all the past clubs aggregate online. it’s also a bit annoying because since we still have to transfer and be competitive for universities, the “school report” that our school will send will probably advertise the school as this rich environment full of opportunities to get involved when in reality that’s completely false. ive been involved in a language club before at our school and i got to meet people from other language clubs as well and they all had the same experience in that the clubs probably meet 3 times a semester and usually only 0-5 people show up (which leads to the club only meeting very few times per semester).
you could plan out a fabulous club with meetings and events but it means nothing if not enough people show up for it to continue running. and yet im pretty sure our school will tell universities that students have so many opportunities to get involved and lead! and then our transfer apps show we weren’t “involved” and it makes us look bad.
and im not even that upset about the application/ECs, but i truly would love to join a club and meet people and learn stuff yet people here aren’t here for anything but going to class and going back home or to work. it’s understandable, since most people that go to CC are mature adults or people who didn’t come straight after high school and they have lives and families to take care of but it sucks for us younger students who couldn’t afford to go to a 4 year university right away (or didn’t have the grades/work ethic/family problems/any reason ect.) and can’t have an environment with which to grow socially among our peers.
i also dislike how unclean our bathrooms are sometimes…im surprised im saying this because our bathrooms are pretty new. but sometimes people leave a mess! that can get annoying. i also find our lab classes pretty annoying. it doesnt feel as if i learn anything from those. it’s just follow directions and do this and that. plus they take hours to do.
i wish our library had more entrances/exits. it only has one main entrance/exit, even though the building itself is fairly big. so if im on one side of the school, id have to walk to the other side to enter the library even though i might already be physically next to the library. lazy problems, i know.
i dislike that we have lots of bible club people always asking us to join their off campus bible club. they probably don’t even go to our school but they just decided to stake out our school or something, i dont know why they cant go somewhere else. same goes for people asking others to sign petitions. those aren’t as annoying though since they’re usually only around for a day or few. but these religious people have been here everyday for the past several weeks and it’s becoming a huge annoyance. i can’t even sit outside anymore without always being approached by one of them. and every day without fail they always ask! is there any way to report them to get them to stop loitering on campus?
something that has recently annoyed me is that there’s no stapler in one of my classes. this is the first class ive had where we dont have a stapler yet also the first where we have had to turn in homework every class. so i usually do my homework before class but then i have to search the school for a stapler or ask someone to let me borrow theirs. i really dont want to lug a stapler (even the tiny ones) around because im already getting back problems from my laptop and i try to carry as little as possible for that.
i kinda wish the cafes were open a bit later for night classes. and more study rooms in other buildings, not just two.
@shawnspencer 3) People asking for grade changes because they think they “deserved” a higher grade than they got
god, this!
i remember this dude who had gotten straight As his first semester (at a CCC, mind you) and he hadn’t even taken transfer level courses yet. these were like basic, remedial level and non-transferable electives. and then the next semester he was taking a transfer level science class and was doing badly and blamed everybody but himself. it was ridiculous. he somehow thought that his A’s in easy classes last semester made him an “A student” who couldn’t possibly get anything else. such disgusting attitude. these people are too egotistical to even realize it’s a wake up call.
i wonder if this is common at universities as well or if it’s just a CC problem. i imagine all of the AP 4.5 students that went straight to 4 years might get a wake up call as well but at least they’ve probably confronted what it means to struggle/work hard when they were in said AP classes.
@otoribashi I totally agree on the club list thing. My university has listed as an active organization the Anime club and I literally made time in my school/work schedule for that club and it appears it no longer exists. This makes me so sad lol
@preamble1776
In a different angle, I am commuting and I go to a school that is probably about half half in commuting and dorming/in campus. I also hate the fact that many in campus/dorm students will tend to tell you how you are missing the “college experience” and make you feel bad for either not wanting to live in campus or not affording it. I just want to be like: “well, excuse me for not having parents who can pay for my college and for having to work multiple jobs to simply afford to go to the school”.
This seriously annoys me. Plus, it isn’t like I commute a long time it is only 15 min away from my house with a lot of traffic, it is pointless. It just makes me feel like others just expect you to be boring and have no social life when in reality we do all make our college experience!