School is a pain

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Too mundane for the Pit. I know I’m not the only student here…

I think this semester is the most likely to end up driving me nuts, just because this is the first time I’ve gone full-time at this college. And the class most likely to do it is… Web Design! If you’ve ever done it, I’m sure you know why!

Y’know, what the heck was wrong with doing things with tables, huh? Seriously, CSS is just a pain in the butt. And Dreamweaver? Why does it even exist? I end up doing all the coding by hand anyway! I’ve gotten all the easy pages done, but I have three that I don’t know how to do. One would be EASY with tables, but I’ve no idea how to do it with CSS. One other I might have a script for. The last I need a script that I can’t quite find. (I’ve SEEN it, but I can’t FIND it. All I freaking want is to have descriptions drop down when you click on the title. And to have the descriptions be color-coded links. With no images.) I’m hoping the teacher can help tomorrow, but it’s hard to get a hold of her since she’s teaching the beginners (fair enough.)

And I still need to finish the graphics for the pages. I have most of them drawn, some of them inked, none of them colored, and I haven’t quite decided which are going where.

And then there’s Digital Photography. I know what I want to do. I just don’t know where I can do it (it involves me changing clothes, so I’m limited on options. I don’t care, but others might). And I think I’m going to end up doing it all with the timer, which will be a pain in the butt, but whatever.

And THEN, my and a suitemate are switching rooms. The college has to make this a much bigger deal than it is, of course. We both have to get all of our stuff out so the RA can check both rooms. My room is a mess, I have stuff to take to my storage unit (and I’m not sure where I’ll put it =0.0= ), and I have a big pile of laundry which I need to get a laundry card so I can do. My suitemate is going to be gone this weekend, and I need to get my Photography project done, but I have to try to get my stuff out too. I guess it’ll make more room for me to do the project.

The thing that’s a constant irritant? The cafeteria. We’re required to buy $550 worth of credit at this place, but frankly, the food sucks. I mean not mystery meat sucks, but I think most of it is pretty bad. The candy is severely overpriced ($1.60 for a normal bag of M&Ms?!) so I won’t buy that, just on principle. The sandwich section is just terrible (incredibly bland), so I won’t eat that. There are about two whole drinks I’ll drink (okay, I’m picky). It’s really annoying and thus I’ve spent less than $50 there in the four weeks since the semester started. I guess I’ll have to start buying milk there every week instead of going to the grocery store. The pasta section is fairly good, if over-cooked, most of the time. I suppose it doesn’t help that if I’m depressed or out of sorts or whatever I really don’t feel like eating at all.

Please, somebody else talk about how college is going so I don’t feel so left out.

2

It’s probably no consolation, but…

You’re far better being in college now then being in the workforce.

My company did its latest round of lay-offs this week.

Trust me, better to still be in school.

3

Oh heck yeah. My dad is looking for a job after the company he worked for went completely under. As much as I dislike my job, I’m holding onto it (besides, who is going to want to let me work around my classes?)

4

As someone who didn’t do so great in school, and wishes he had, stick with it.

As for the food card overages, at the end of the semester, we went on a “beginning of Summer” sort of shopping spree at the local store on campus, since we would have to pay for it anyway.

5

I think the expensive, very bad food is something you will find in most colleges/universities, at least I did at both universities I went to. Also, you can’t always have only fun classes, sometimes you need to get the hang of some tedious stuff (annyone for statistics?) as well. The chances are you will find it useful later on (and regret taking the easiest options); you’re getting a full training in your field, this includes some practical aspects that you just need to know.

6

I am back in school after dropping out the first time around (just not being emotionally ready/mature enough for it and having no idea what I was doing. I was 17 when I entered college initially) and I couldn’t be happier. Agree with the poster above that it’s a much sweeter gig than being a full-time worker right now.

The difference this time is I’m putting a lot more effort into it, and I can already see the dividends in terms of personal satisfaction/sense of well-being, and of course I’m learning. Join some clubs, take some classes which interest you but aren’t part of your major (usually you need some elective credits anyway), make use of the services and amenities the school offers you, and it will be a much more fulfilling experience.

7

You know, I can sympathize with most you said (food prices at our cafeteria are creative), but this is just … wrong. :smiley:

CSS makes it possible to keep content and design separate - so you can use different designs and keep the page easy to read for bots and well organized. Try to Do this with tables (one page, different designs.

Unless of course you are just venting, in that case never mind. :wink:

8

I found out about a week ago that I have to enrol in this 7 hour laboratory safety bullshit thing, so I did. I had to choose a date from a short list, with the choices being something like 20th or 24th Feb, or 10th or 18th of March. For reasons I wont go into, it couldn’t be during Feb for me, so I put 10th down as first preference, 18th as the second.

I got my confirmation today. Today being the 19th. They enrolled me on the 24th. Yay! What the fuck was the point of giving us preferences if they ignore them? But okay, it can’t be easy administrating an entire university, so that’s fine. I sent off an email requesting a change to, you know, what I asked for.

But the kicker: they say they require 7 days notice for changes to the schedule. They require 7 days, when they only give me 5 days notice myself? For what I didn’t even ask for? Seriously, WTF?

They’ll change mine, I’m sure they’ll change mine, but it just grates on my psyche when stuff like this happens. Just once, just once I would like to enrol without having to sent off a flurry of emails because of system glitches and admin failures - and I’ve had it easy compared to my mates.

Oh, and the other thing: the uni actually has a week set aside specifically for initiations and things like that. If you check your calender, you will notice there is a week separating Feb 24 and March 10. Yep, that’s right, they decided to flout the concept, and hold these course before, and after, but not during, the week set aside for those courses.

Sheesh.

9

Fortunately I’ve pretty much already gotten all the boring classes done (although Art, Mass Media, and Society is going to drive me nuts. We’ll see how the midterm goes…) It’s not a choice of easiest anymore, just what’s required, what fits in my schedule, and what applies to my focus (Graphic Design vs Fine Arts vs Multimedia).

Allwalker, I feel ya. To move into the dorms we had to take this bullshit online alcohol education thing. Like anyone paid attention to it, plus I’m not fresh out of high school. At this age if I’m going to drink, I’m going to drink. (I don’t hardly at all). Not to mention the whole food card / school ID mess, where the frikking thing didn’t work. And trying to actually get info out of the housing department. You’d think colleges would be more organized wouldn’t you?

10

Colleges organized? Bah. I’m set to graduate in May and part of that involves getting a record audit from the graduation office to see if I have everything I need. I’m already a bit annoyed with them because they managed to lose my major sheet last semester when I handed it in – they had the other paperwork that I handed in at exactly the same time, but not the major sheet. Where was the major sheet? In their misplaced items file. And because I never would’ve found out about that hold on my graduation without getting a hold on my registration from the bursar’s office (which is another painful story altogether), I now regularly check for any holds just to make sure there isn’t anything I need to take care of…which came in handy because the same day they mailed me a form telling me my requirements were fulfilled provided I don’t fail my final class for my minor, the graduation office put a new hold on my graduation because they needed my ACT scores.

They have my ACT scores. They have had my ACT scores since I started – I got exempted from one of the English composition classes because my English score on the thing was high enough. But apparently, they need to have this exemption extra-certified from some other office I’ve never been in and can’t find. I wouldn’t even mind doing this so much if they would just tell me it needs to be done in the first place instead of me finding some cryptic hold on my student account and then going in to have yet another chat with the clueless people at the front desk.

So now I’m worried about what else is going to pop up. I just want to graduate!

11

I am in class at this very moment. You’ll notice I am putting only about half of my attention towards it.

Spring break starts tomorrow.

Oh my god, the guest lecturer just asked us if we’ve taken an introductory class in psychometrics. Not only do I not know what that is, Firefox says it’s misspelled. I have NO idea what he’s talking about.

Anyway, I’m going to Colombia on Saturday. It cannot come soon enough.

12

Ah, school. Such a love-hate relationship.

I have to take a Statistics class this semester. It’s awful, I don’t think I get it at all. I always go to class and pay attention, but some days the professor may as well be speaking Greek for all the sense it makes.

Also, I have a lot of research to do and I am suffering from a bad bout of procrastination. This seems to hit me every year at some point and is just deadly - whole weeks can go by without me even cracking a book. Important stuff sits there, taunting me, while I check my email or watch TV or read the dope or stare out the window. I’ve done all the list making and splitting tasks into small chunks and yadda yadda yadda that those self-help type books recommend but nothing helps, I just have to wait for it to lift by itself.

Sigh.
ETA: I wish I was going to Colombia! No Fair!

13

I am about fed up of Bar School…NOW. God damn!

14

Heh, I’ll take any opportunity to kvetch about school… :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m in my third semester as a Mechanical Engineering major at University of Maryland, and it’s ROUGH. I have 17 credits this semester - Dynamics (3 credits + lab), Thermodynamics (3 credits + lab), Physics II (4 credits + lab), Calculus III (4 credits), and Multicultural America (3 credits). The lectures are rough enough, but the homework… Oh god the homework. It’s insane, and neverending, an inexorable and irresistable tide which I am just BARELY able to keep ahead of. It frequently takes me half an hour to an hour to do one problem, and it’s not uncommon for me to have 10-12 problems per tech class per week. That’s 40-50 hours or HW, plus 17 hours of lectures, plus labs, plus reading and writing for my Multicultural America course. If it weren’t for the fact that I absolutely refuse to let down my parents (who are paying for school for me, bless their hearts), I don’t know how I’d find the willpower to get it all done.

Speaking of that Multicultural America course… It was supposed to be BS. Filler. An easy class to fill an elective slot. But nooooooooooooo… The professor has her PhD in Literature and used to teach English so we get 100+ pages of scholarly articles to read per week, and we have an endless stream of papers, essays, and other writings we have to do. Ugh. I should really drop it, save myself the trouble and take an easier elective next semester… But I’m stubborn and refuse to give up.

My other four courses are a different knd of hard, all very intensive with a TON of math… I have to use integral calculus in all four of them on a regular basis and I LOATHE integral calculus. It doesn’t help that most of my teachers and TA’s have heavy Asian accents that make them hard to understand, and my Thermodynamics professor is so incompetent and scatterbrained I may as well not even go to lecture and just study the book instead. Dynamics is rough too, I seriously do not understand cylindrical coordinate systems, or integrating functions that are set up in Polar coordinates. What ever happened to good ol’ X and Y? Are they no longer enough? Of course not, it’s never enough. Somehow that course makes concepts I thought I understood on the kind of basic, fundamental level I understand breathing - topics like forces, vectors, and kinematics - and make them so complex I have to wrack my brain to solve even basic problems. It’s BRUTAL, I invest at least 24 hours a week in that class alone. Thank Og for Calc III and Physics II being relatively easy, and my calc teacher is really nice and a great guy - I love him, in a completely platonic non-creepy sort of way.

This is an especially bad week for me too. I have a paper due next Monday, tests in Calc III and Dynamics next Tuesday, and homework in all 5 classes, lots of problems and reading… Blech. Ah well, gotta do what you gotta do.

Still, all in all it’s not so bad. If school gets me down, I just remind myself that all this hard work will pay off later when I land a job making six figures a year doing work that I love. That, plus taking time to hang out with friends and roommates, keeps the drudgery from becoming too much to deal with. :smiley:

On a completely unrelated note… STG, are you by chance a furry? Your username, emoticon use, and the fact that you’re enough of a “nerd grrl” to take a Web Design course have made me curious.

15

Yeah I am. I don’t really do anything about it, but I like me some fuzzy critter-people.

16

Unless I A) get accepted (which isn’t looking likely) and B) can scrounge up the money to start grad school in the fall, this is my last semester.

I’ll be graduating with a liberal arts degree. Oh boy am I excited about my job prospects.

Right now all I’ve really got to bitch about is not knowing whether the committee has accepted my senior thesis. If they have, I get to spend a couple weeks stressing until the defense. If not…well, boy am I screwed. I don’t have any reason to assume it won’t be, and my adviser seemed quite happy with the final product, but still.

Other highlights of my final semester: non-Euclidean geometry (just shoot me now. No, seriously, please), breeding fruit flies (FlyNap smells like rotting chemical ass), and an incredibly slow reading of Go Down, Moses, which so far has convinced me that I absolutely hate Faulkner and want to bring him back to life so I can make him die a painful death. Also, next week we’re spending one class meeting of a philosophy class discussing Tristan und Isolde, which everyone in the class has already studied and I personally loathe it. The music is mediocre, the plot is mind-numbing, there’s never been a decent production of it, and we have Wagner to thank for the movement towards atonality, which makes me want to bludgeon someone with a Beethoven score. (At some point, undertaking this magnificently idiotic course of study I’m almost done with seemed like a good idea.)

As for meals, someday I will find a meal in the cafeteria (stupidly expensive flat rate, 14 meals a week, only one cafeteria on campus) that is seasoned with something other than green chile or black pepper. Seriously, get some garlic. Get some…I don’t even know what, I’m not a person who cooks because I’m trapped in your crappy meal plan, but there are other spices out there!

17

[flashback to Fall 1983]

So where the hell is Grenada, and why are we invading?

Fuck it…there’s a open keg party at one of the frats :smiley:

[/flashback to Fall 1983]

18

Hope you don’t mind if I pick on you for a minute. I do understand why you feel this way.

On the other hand, as someone who teaches a class a lot of people are taking as their elective, this attitude drives me up the wall. Yeah, I know that to these people it’s about an easy filler, but to me, it’s what I do! And I want to do my best to give the students a meaningful experience.

But yes, school is a pain. This is my first semester teaching my own class - writing lectures is a lot harder than you might think. And, dissertation? What dissertation?

19

Helen, I’m totally with you on this! And Alastair, I teach classes along those lines at MD. :slight_smile:

20

Ah, I apologize for my wording. I meant no offense, and to be fair, there are fascinating discussions on an almost daily basis on the nature of race, gender, and sexual roles and intractions in America, and that sort of spirited intellectual discourse is lke candy to me.

My only beef is that the heavy reading and writing load is hard to deal with on top of the endless hours of technical homework I get saddled with. :wink:

Still, chin up and all that. Teachers who genuinely care make the best instructors because of their willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty to ensure thei students succeed. Kudos to you for your hard work!