From an extremely young age we are told to pursue a career in what we love to do. Money shouldn’t matter, travel shouldn’t matter and neither should opinions of others nor influences from the media. Doing what makes us happy for the rest of our lives, and being paid to do just that, is the ultimate goal that we all strive for. However, there is a list of tedious and strenuous steps to getting there, if you can even get to that point at all.
It is unrealistic to think that you should be handed a diploma on a silver platter without putting any effort into your graduating degree. Learning and training for the job you want is hard work that requires time and energy. Starting in high school, we are told to start to think about what we want to do the rest of our lives. Right away, the common ideas of teacher, lawyer, doctor and journalist come to mind. As time passes and you have to start applying to get into college, everyone learns that there are specified, unique, talented and rewarding jobs out there in the world that you might have never heard of. Similar to many other attributes to life, there is a profession out there for everyone.
Currently, I am a female student in my junior year at a state university, and I couldn’t be happier about it. When I applied to college my junior year of high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, amongst almost every single other student I spoke with. When I got accepted and it came time to declare a major I decided to go with business marketing. I figured it couldn’t be that hard, I would get to work with others, and the money would be good. Classes started, grades came back, two years passed and I hit a wall. I realized I wasn’t pursuing what would make me happy and only participating in what would make me wealthy. So in my junior year, I changed my major to communications and decided I want to, and actually want to, become a news anchor. Little did I know that in doing so, I would be going through pointless, useless, unneeded and completely stupid classes to get there.
I am a communications major. I want to go into the career field revolved around writing, speaking, sharing, communicating and effective messages. Want to hear the class schedule I have right now?
Women’s Studies, Philosophy of Ethics, Art in the History in Spain, Spanish 101 and Interpersonal Communications. This is not a joke.
With the exception of one class, I am not learning anything nearly relevant or helpful to my major at all, and I'm calling complete and utter bullshit. College is suppose to be where each individual can take the classes they need to better educate themselves for whatever they may decide to do with the rest of their future. It’s nonsense that I have to sit in a two-hour class lecture learning about a cave drawling from 300 B.C.E. done in southern Spain. It is also irrelevant to my future and myself to be researching the first wave of feminism in the 20th century.
College has taken the joy away from learning for me. I am a honor roll, Dean’s List, straight A’s student, and I am on the verge of giving up because I've realized it’s all a system. Money is the name of the game and almost every college student can relate when I say they are wasting hard-earned money to get a degree by being in classes that have no value to them, and for that reason alone I, now, think school is absurd. Of course, I can’t drop out and continue on with life because, nowadays, you can’t get hired to a successful company unless you have a degree to show for it. This, again, is unconditionally ridiculous considering my graduating degree will be filled with 50 percent pointless knowledge I will never need to use in what I want to pursue. A problem like this isn’t something a single person can conquer, but rather a society that wants to change the system as a whole. Hopefully, enough people will wake up and realize this is a problem before it gets any worse than it already is.
