Huh. I learned plenty about all of those things. Maybe my college was better than yours. Or maybe I just took more interesting classes.
Either way, I paid for all of it on my own dime, though.
Congratulations on your degree.
Acquire ability to write dot points.
Learn how to make the fucking obvious a Powerpoint presentation.
Summarize whole bodies of knowledge to point of meaninglessness.
**Apply footnotes and references.
**
I gotta agree with this. I always double check what the course book says against my own knowledge and if there’s any miss match I research who’s right and why. One of my teachers says just to put the book answer for questions because it matches his key, but I’ve found a balance. If there’s a book error I’ll say “the books says… but I don’t think that’s correct because… <explanation and cite>”. Even though dude occasionally gets a paragraph answer for a true/false question he doesn’t seem to have a problem with it that way.
I have an excel class this january. I plan to do my homework in excel then redo it in open office. That way I can get more out of the class. Same with windows utilities class. It aims for xp, but there’s no reason I can’t go the extra mile and learn it for vista, even windows 7 M2, and the equivalent functions in posix\linux.
I have alot of self taught base skills with computers. So if I push really hard I can get alot more from the classes and give myself an advantage.
That said Airman is right; this site is an education in it’s self. So is wikipedia. If you like over 9000 open tabs you’ll love wikipedia. Things discussed here tend to be jumping off points for wiki sessions.
For one thing, I agree with pretty much everything even sven said.
For another, you started a thread … in the Pit … to tell us all how you wasted taxpayers’ (that’s most of us) money for five years in college and didn’t bother to glean a damned thing from the experience other than “I’m a whiny fuck who wasn’t spoon-fed the things I think I should have learned?”
Eat shit. An awful lot of people would love to have the ability to go back to college and finish, or go in the first place. An awful lot of people manage to get a really decent education from shitty community schools because they are so eager to learn they even pay attention to the boring classes with the soporific teachers.
Fuck you and your overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
This pisses me off. This is what you do with elementary school kids who can’t understand the full complexity of the world and mainly need to be taught basic reading skills. It is completely out of place at the secondary school level and absolutely moronic in post-secondary education.
Is it out of place to say ‘I love you’? 
This is way too fucking rare in the technical world in general. I hope you learn more programming languages than you need to, as well: Even more than different OSes, languages reflect different ways to see problems and structure solutions. I’m more than willing to help point you in the direction of resources to learn a wide variety of languages.
If you have an ounce of honor in your soul, you will turn that degree of yours back over to the college that granted it to you. You don’t deserve it. You squandered an opportunity to get an education, and come here to brag about it, flaunting the fact that it cost you nothing.
Fuck you, you ignorant piece of shit.
Your sense of entitlement is astounding. You’re a fucking welfare scammer, Doors. You were given something of tremendous value, but because you didn’t have to pay for it, you didn’t recognize that value.
You know what you sound like? You sound like me, 18 years ago, full of arrogance and superiority and self-importance. Well, I found out the value of education by making my way without one, and when I went back 5 years ago, I didn’t have my head up my ass anymore. You obviously still do. I graduated in May of this year, and it is one of the proudest of my life’s accomplishments, because I worked my ass off, I earned it, I learned a LOT, and I appreciate the value of that education.
You fucking loafer. I think you should send each and every active member of the SDMB a refund on whatever portion of our tax dollars paid for your miserable, wasted education.
And by the way, I doubt you’ll have to worry about anyone giving you more money than you ‘actually deserve’ just because you have that ‘piece of paper’. People will recognize you for what you are - a fucking fraud. Because for you, all that is is a piece of paper, devoid of meaning, devoid or value and unearned.
I can’t believe you’d post that on this message board. The so-called bastion of intelligence and education. You’re bragging about faking it through college. Un-fucking-real. I hope you spend the rest of your life in a fucking trailer park, because with sentiments like you’ve expressed here, that’s what you deserve.
Asswipe.
I am sorry that you either
A) Went to a crap school
B) Had a crap program in a good school
C) Refused to learn
D) Were the .01% exception who is so self evidently genius that they should have awarded you a Doctorum Adamus cum Flabello Dulci immediately upon your registration.
If it was A or B, then my condolences. I too was a “non-traditional” student as they say, and after community college, I transfered into a combination of A and B. But here is the kicker, I recognized that it was crap, and only wasted one semester there. I applied for, and worked hard to get into a better school. There, I learned a massive amount of information, and was able to get into the Masters of Engineering Program at MIT with that education. I wouldn’t have learned anything from that first school. So you are responsible for your own education, and should have done whatever it takes to get your moneys worth.
Honestly, from your past threads, I don’t think Poli-Sci is the program you should have been in. It never sounded like you had a passion for it. But now you have your degree, and you can show us all by becoming a raging success without ever using it.
It’s not our fault you had so much difficulty with it, that you couldn’t retain any knowledge and that you don’t have enough imagination or curiosity to be sparked by an education.
I got plenty out of college. I learned a lot in classes, but more importantly, I was inspired enough to keep learning on my own after the classes were over. Granted, I don’t know what it’s like for every class to be a mortal struggle. I can’t identify with being stupid and slow, and having to work at it, and then not being able to remember anything I’ve learned, so maybe I just don’t have the life experience to relate to yours.
Or maybe I just appreciate it more because I paid (actually am still paying) for it myself.
Judging by your thread title, you didn’t learn how to spell either.
Jesus Diogenes, that was a little over the top. I don’t remember any Airman threads complaining that he couldn’t remember anything.
In fact, it was the opposite, he could remember, but he always disagreed with the professor. On just about everything. So the problem sounds more like arrogance than anything else.
This thread pisses off alot of us, especially those of us who paid for school themselves, but I don’t think its fair to insinuate that Airman is stupid, because I think that his posting history has proved that he isn’t.
Mybe you would have liked college better if they let you bring your gun with you.
<d&r’s>
That’s my interpretation of his admitted inability to have learned anything.
I remember him talking about struggling with some classes, but I can’t be assed to search for the threads. I also think his “disagreements” with instructors who know a lot more than he does are a sign of intellectual deficiency. He went into those classes with no intention of trying to learn anything, but only to be the douchebag who always has to argue with the professor. I remember those guys. They were never, ever as smart as they imagined they were.
I can’t honestly say whether or not Airman had a great college experience which he botched, or a horrific, boring college experience which he rose above. From my own personal experience, i’d guess maybe a bit of both. But I don’t think i’d be willing to condemn the university system based on my own, single, personal example. Hell, I don’t think i’d be willing to condemn even my particular subject as taught at unis.
I’m not sure I agree with all the people attacking you in this thread, Airman. But it does show one thing - some people, at least, do feel that they have got something out of it. For them (and for me), it was worth it, and though i’m in significant debt to pay for the thing, i’d do it again if I had the chance. I did get something out of it. That you didn’t no more invalidates what I got than what I got invalidates what you didn’t.
Hey, I wanted to be that guy. I really did. I put the time in one papers, I went to class, I did the group work, I sat in on discussions, I participated as much as I could given the constraints on my time. I did everything I could to get the whole “college experience”. It simply didn’t happen for me.
I paid for it, just not in cash. That little barb was me feeling exceptionally cynical last night. My apologies for that particular comment.
I’ll take the hit for that little typo. As I said earlier, how ironic.
Oh, but I do. If there is one thing that I enjoyed, it was the sparring with my professors. The problem is that I do that here as well, so it was not particularly novel, and I never felt like the “free exchange of ideas” was a standard that could be maintained over “this person can fail me for my opinion”. It never seemed like I could fully participate.
Not so. I did everything I was supposed to do and then some.
I’m not trying to invalidate your experiences. I’m trying to justify my own.
If you go into it with the attitude that you’re not going to learn anything, it isn’t worth your time, and you already know all you need to, you’re not likely to get anything out of it. Mainly because you’re not going to take hold of your education and research the best opportunities and programs.
It may be that your school wasn’t the best/have the best programs-but I don’t consider it that difficult to transfer provided you bring in the grades. People in California transfer from community colleges to the UCs all the time.
Either way, I think it boils down to a level of respect. Your post comes off like you think you’re above education or that it’s weeniesh in some way. Every one makes mistakes during school-I have myself, twice. I never went on a study abroad program during either of my two degrees, which I really regret. I’ll soon be on my last degree (MBA) and I fully plan to rectify that mistake. On the other hand, I fundamentally respect education and the process of getting an education. I don’t consider myself to be above my professors and I try to keep that in mind while approaching them. It’s not that every prof is going to be the best teacher, but I’ve found many that really are wonderful and if you make an effort to find someone you get along with, they’ll help you out, a LOT, for no other reason than the whole teaching thing is some kind of life’s purpose thing for them. Seriously, I have never found so many people who are generous for the simple reason that they consider it part of their professional duty. My legal ethics prof was a hardcore Republican (served in the second Bush admin) whose political views I did not share and he’d always make sure to tease me in class for being a liberal east coast Republican and a traitor to modern conservatism. But we got along, I made an effort to have facetime at his office hours and he wrote personal letters to his friends at firms in Boston to get me interviews-without me suggesting it. He brought it up himself after I told him where I was originally from. I still write to him. It’s a good contact and he helped me out of his own accord because I made an effort.
If your school was really shitty, I’m sorry. But I’m sure there were people there who would have helped you move on to something better if you had asked respectfully and made an effort.
Ditto on all the flack you’re getting from people who had to pay their own way.
- I understand why employers would want someone with a college degree. No, it doesn’t always tell you which person is the “smartest” (whatever that means) or which one “learned” the most. But employers get a lot of resumes. They can’t interview all the people who apply. They need a quick way to pare it down. You got a college degree. That required you to apply long-term planning skills and comprehension to a likely labyrinthine maze of prerequisites and other requirements. It required you to show up on time to a lot of classes. It required you to hand things in on time. It probably required you to work on projects in groups of people you didn’t know and/or like. So by knowing that you got a college degree, I have a little bit more information about you than I do about someone who didn’t get a college degree. Maybe the other guy is smarter than you, maybe he’s better at meeting deadlines and working with others and understanding complex long-term viewpoints. Maybe. But your college degree tells me that you’re at least minimally competent on all these things, and therefore a safer bet than the other guy. The only way to know for sure how a job applicant is going to perform is to hire him and see how he does. Someone with a college degree is a safer bet, in my book, not because he learned anything in college, but because he had the savvy, patience, and persistence to get through all the bullshit.
If that’s so, then I apologise. But your OP was phrased in such a way to suggest you weren’t only questioning the value you got out of your own college experience, but also to question the point of that experience in general. This bit, I mean;
It seemed to me you were assuming that everyone’s experience was the same as yours; you didn’t ask whether other people had learned to write better, or learned more about their chosen subject. Your questions as to whether others thought it worth it seemed to take it for granted that those were the pertinent questions to ask, with the others already answered by yourself on behalf of everyone else. And you end up by saying you don’t see the point of a university education, which seems to be pretty much invalidative (is that a word? Maybe I need to go back ;)) of other’s experiences to me.
There’s no need to apologize. My OP was somewhat provocative.
I assumed (incorrectly, as usual) that people would recognize the personal nature of what I said by the title. Why would my reflections have any particular relevance to anybody else’s? My wife loved college. More than anything else she wants to go back. That’s fine. For my part, at this moment in time, I’d rather have someone rip my arm off and beat me to death with it than go back for more. I can’t figure out what I missed that was so special. Perhaps I never will.
Hey, when was the last time someone said “Thank You” for your service? Thanks. And congratulations on your degree.
I learned how to learn at college. Not sit that and be spoon fed, but actually to learn. It taught me how to take multiple sources and distill them down into coherent structures.
That’s way more important to me than the specific information I learned, and it is something I use every day in my current life.