Why are you going to college?

Student Lounge College Life
41

<p>ooooooooooooooooookay highschool senior, hold your horses.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>are you first gen or something? if 68.3 percent of the past year’s high school seniors (actual statistic, bro) have gone on to college, then close to 3/4 of the high school population are going to be your college classmates. unless only 1/4 of your highschool was the anti-intellectual part, you’re likely to encounter the same sentiments about poetry etc. in college. </p>

<p>since college has become very much a ubiquitous right of passage, I don’t see how people think that the contingent is any different from their high school. nobody has illusions about high school students drinking deeply from anything but the beer keg. i assure you, it is very much the same case in college.</p>

<p>by which i mean that intelligent, insightful people and opportunities to learn exist outside of college. college merely creates an environment, but you have to do all the work of finding ‘awesome people’ and ‘digging the aggregate of human knowledge’ on your own. probably in your room. in your bed. eating popcorn and talking to your mom on the phone.</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>so what are you gonna do after college? cos i’ve been having the same feeling, but so far i haven’t been able to get donald trump to adopt me.</p>

<p>p.s. your writing is too melodramatic to be effective, and watch your comma splices.</p>

42

<p>

Not in my situation. Talking merit aid, not need-based.</p>

43

<p>I can’t get over the fact you said you’re too good for college haha</p>

44

<p>I read that the number one reason for going to college has shifted over time to “to make more money”.</p>

<p>Kinda dissappointed in my generation tbh.</p>

45

<p>My future career of choice requires a college degree. If I don’t get one, I’m not getting a job.</p>

46

<p>For people like you, college isn’t about you actually learning, its about you getting a piece of paper (a degree) that says that you are a capable person. Image working as a hiring manager in a big company and receiving three hundred resumes for people looking for jobs. Of the three hundred people that sent you a resume one hundred of them don’t have college degrees. The first thing you would do is cut those people without college degrees just to cut down on your workload. So getting a degree is all about perception. Its about making you LOOK good.</p>

<p>-JScott
[How</a> To Be Successful In College](<a href=“http://how-to-be-successful-in-college.blogspot.com/]How”>http://how-to-be-successful-in-college.blogspot.com/)</p>

47

<p>I hope to be a Police Detective someday and that requires a degree. Well that and the government is going to pay me to go (GI Bill).</p>

48

<p>@ Vienneselights Romanticism and histrionics aside, I want to genuinely learn something. Yah, I want to go to graduate school and I want to, eventually, work in academia. The reason I took some extra minutes to add a little color to my post was just to emphasize that I don’t agree at all with the whole “get the paper, get the job” mindset. I know how that the types of people I will find in college will usually be just like the people I knew in high school, but that doesn’t matter to me because that’s not what I will be there for. That’s the question right? Why I want to go to college? Maybe I’m not as filled with the same disillusioned cynicism that you seem to bleed but I think the only inspection you need to do is into yourself. </p>

<p>tl;dr : Re-evaluate your attitude, bro, no job or degree or amount of knowledge will ever make you happy. Happiness is all on you, and I sincerely believe college nurtures curiosity infinitely more than high school. So that’s what I want.</p>

49

<p>well to be perfectly honest…
…because I don’t know what else I want to do with my life
…because I’m not ready to be outside of a school environment yet.</p>

50

<p>^Those aren’t at all bad reasons.</p>

51

<p>To provide a better life for my son and I, because almost every job now requires some sort of post-secondary education. Also, because I want to become a social worker and give back to my community. Plus, I love learning!</p>

52

<p>I’m a high school senior. My reasons for going to college next fall:</p>

<ol>
<li>To be intellectually stimulated</li>
<li>To seek new life experiences</li>
<li>To be better equipped for a career (okay, this is more of an afterthought at this time in life, to be honest)</li>
</ol>

53

<p>I’m in college so that, should I need a degree to get a job, I have one. Also, if I ever choose to obtain postgraduate training (which, at this time in my life, I don’t want to!), I’ll have a degree. </p>

<p>Truth is, I empathize with everyone in this thread. For the seniors/other HS students, I felt similarly to most of you when I started college, but I learned relatively quickly that college students (mostly freshman!) are basically just high school seniors with lots of freedom. For the college freshman, I’m not going to lie: the sophomore slump is a real thing. After freshman year, I feel like there’s less of a “check-in” from the administrative side, and you’re not really old enough for most internships (they want juniors and seniors in many cases), so I wouldn’t worry if you start to feel a sense of “why do I even bother?” If you acknowledge that what you’re feeling is normal and you make an effort to break out of the slump (by socializing and trying to find a class/research opportunity/etc. that inspires you), you’ll be fine.</p>

54

<p>To enter the workforce with a good paying, stable job that I can see myself doing until I retire.</p>

55

<p>I give you a lot of credit for this one and the condescending remarks are incredibly irritating, they also (in my humble opinion) just show a lack of self-exploration and honest thought which I think are prerequisites for having 2 cents here. I was on my own at 16 too after my parents died, and I completely agree with you. The most difficult thing I experienced was definitely Not taking care of myself financially, it was staying motivated in school…</p>

<p>It’s not always when you fail a class that you stop and wonder why you’re still trying to “do school”, sometimes it’s when you’re starting your 15th semester and it feels exactly like the first. So why keep going? Your gonna have to answer that question yourself, and you know that because your smart. Any response here isn’t gonna strike a chord because it’s not gonna be the same type of intelligent rationale that you can develop yourself. </p>

<p>Personally I have stayed in school all these years… because I felt like I should. That’s really the only explanation I could give somebody if they asked. I didn’t always know what I was working towards, but I have always loved mastering knowledge and I’ve always known that I wanted to come accross as, ehr “educated”. That was enough for me… and something has been enough for you too (obviously). I hope you answer that question. You seem like you’ve put in a genuine effort to get where you are and it’s uncomfortable to not know that answer… you deserve it. Good luck</p>

56

<p>Here are my reasons not in any particular order as a high school senior.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>More Freedom: One of the things I look forward to in college is that I will have more freedom and thus, make more of my own choices. Even if people have told me that some students can’t use their freedom properly, I find that having freedom is something that everyone has to go through at some point in life, and college is a great time for that. </p></li>
<li><p>Change and new experiences </p></li>
<li><p>To meet new people</p></li>
<li><p>To Learn</p></li>
<li><p>To Explore</p></li>
<li><p>A chance to start over: I loved high school, but there were a lot of things that I learned in high school that I would love to be able to do over. College is another chance to start over and be better.</p></li>
</ol>

57

<p>^^I wouldn’t say that most of these responses are condescending; it just seems pretty obvious to most of us that a degree helps us earn more money and enter our desired career fields.</p>

58

<p>1) There are some things I can’t learn or do on my own. For e.g, a genetics lab.
2) A relatively safe environment to try out a few things (anything, really).
3) In the case of US colleges, the flexibility to explore a few different majors.
4) Certification. I gotta flash that piece of paper to get past the HR gates.
5) Hopefully, having professors I can discuss things with during office hours.</p>

<p>My idea of a life well lived, however, does not require a college degree. It also does not require a job I hate that sucks the life out of me, to the extent of making me Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty, and it does not require me being neck deep in
debt.</p>

<p>Realizing that college wasn’t all that it is cracked up to be, at least it does not seem so for me, was a pretty big shock.</p>

<p>Had I been German, or perhaps American, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with college. A lot of what I am interested in learning, I would have learned in a German high school (literature, history, politics, some of the “Great Books”, etc), and that would have been a solid enough background to keep on learning on my own from a library. </p>

<p>I would then do an apprenticeship and find myself some employment, and work on my independent studies, travelling around the country and meeting new people, and writing whenever I could find the time. </p>

<p>If I were American, I’d have spent a few years at community college to take some humanities and social science courses, and to earn a practical associate’s degree. And then, the next step would be more or less what I described above. I’d keep writing and pitching my work to agents, or attempt to read my stuff at book stores or coffee shops. See if I can publish some stuff on a regular publication. I’d also learn some other instruments, try to write some music, and just explore various kinds of music. I’d buy records. I’d also learn more about different kinds of beers and whisky. Different food, and powerlifting/strongman training, and some outdoor activities (say, trail biking) too.</p>

<p>As it stands now, I will go to college. I will major in whatever course I found most interesting. Along the way, I will get involved in some activities that could provide me with some transferable experience (or just regular campus employment) and also find myself at least one 3 month internship. It’s quite cut and dry, really.</p>

<p>In a nutshell, I would be pretty happy being a third rate Hank Moody or Bukowski. Third rate comes with far less drinking and relationships that are slightly more functional. But mostly less substance abuse. Central to my life well lived manifesto involves staying alive. Who’d have thought!</p>

59

<p>As a child I would read fantasy books about an unlikely hero doing great, brave things and opening his eyes to an experience beyond what others feel. As many who read these kind of books, I projected my self, my personality, onto these characters and felt that the adventures were really my adventures. I honestly could not think of any other way that I would rather live my life…I needed to one day show my inner self because underneath my outward appearance, I was Harry Potter, or Bobby Pendragon, or whichever other character in whatever book.
I grew and that small, naive, and selfish feeling of hiding a great, honest, and awesome potential stayed within me. Instead of being discovered by some enlightened benefactor, however, I learned that the people who have led amazing lives simply taught themselves forms of self discipline and possessed a love for something greater than themselves. To be like them I had to have the drive to improve myself and to not live stagnantly. Well, it soon became apparent that learning held that key to self-improvement and held immense potential.
So my desire to go to college derives from a hope that it is there where I will sharpen my ability to perceive the world and develop my self-discipline. I hope to lay seeds there that will help me throughout my life. I even hope, deep in that self-important world of mine, that in college I will find the kind of people and experiences that will make my life an adventure. I don’t know. I suppose my desire to go to college is not all based on this ideal…but its what drives me often and most powerfully.</p>

60

<p>Like, I’m too good for this.</p>

<p>That seems like a very elitist attitude. If I were to wager a guess I’d say you’re not enjoying your experience and you’re trying to rationalize why. Smarter and more capable individuals than you have attended college.</p>