Staff Columnist
It has been a long, tough, and exhausting road these past four years. Oh yeah, I guess I should mention that I’m graduating, for those of you that did not know. It’s been great writing all these opinion articles for you, as many or as few of you that may have read them. I’m at least glad to have been here, and if you were not glad about that, well it’s a shame you never told me.
Since I’m graduating, one of the opportunities I’m afforded here at The Elm is a chance to write a “goodbye article” to, I suppose, express my sentiments about leaving, maybe about what I’ve learned during my time here at Washington College, and maybe even pass on some words of wisdom. Having been given this opportunity, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how positive or how negative I’d like to be in congruence with my actual feelings regarding my time on campus.
I’ve decided I’m not going to sugarcoat my college experience for you all. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have been given educational opportunities unlike any other, and my time here has included unique experiences that have helped me grow as a person. I have made friends that I will never want to lose, and overall I would not trade away my time spent here.
But again, it has not been easy. I have spent nights staying up till 7 a.m., tugging at my hair, struggling to get it all done, wondering whether this next assignment would be the end of my sanity. The struggle of academic expectations have, for me personally, felt so immense that I have considered dropping out more than once just to escape what has on occasion felt like a cage.
The expectations exceeded my level of commitment by my junior year; I began to stop caring about the quality of much of my work. I started blowing off many of my duties to the last minute. I settled for “passing” as opposed to personal satisfaction with the quality of my writing.
This has not been the case for all of my duties, nor was it the case with how I began my college career. My work for Washington College’s yearbook “The Pegasus,” for example, has gone through months of daily production, unhindered despite my growing dissatisfaction with everything else.
Yet for the workloads which I did handle haphazardly, I know I did so out of a great disinterest in my work similar to the way one feels about household chores. Some, not all, but some of my classes became monotonous routines in which I lost any interest in the educational value of the assignments and settled for simply doing them to get them out of the way. I am now in a position where college has left me feeling completely exhausted, and I hope it will be quite some time before I pick up any academic literature again.
It’s upsetting because this should not be the experience of college. Based on conversations I have had with others, I do not believe I am alone in feeling this way, even if no one else is willing to admit it.
So my advice might be a little strange, but is also how I honestly feel. Having talked with one professor about how little interest I have in my academic work and how there are only two or three things I actually want to do, she suggested to me that maybe college was not where I needed to be at this point in time.
Obviously I did not heed those words so close to my graduation, but what I do want to say is that if you are feeling dismay at all your work here to the extent that it makes you miserable, or apathetic, or generally disinterested in an education, then college is not the place for you. Trust me when I say there is no point in taking classes that make you unhappy, because in those instances where you aren’t happy, you will not find yourself taking anything away from the work you do.
There is no shame in not going to college, even in dropping out. If you realize that the whole experience is forcing you to spend thousands of dollars on an experience you are not getting, then do yourself a favor and escape.