What college does teach us

Graduating from college can be upsetting when you look back and realize most of what you learned is irrelevant. But you can take solace in knowing that it wasn't just a very expensive waste of time. You did learn something valuable, even if you don't realize it.

Too many times I've heard of students who needed to be advised two or three times a semester because each advisor gave them different information. We end up taking classes we don't need, missing opportunities we aren't aware of, or making multiple trips to the Sam Center. Yes, this is madness; however, there is a lesson here. These experiences teach us what questions to ask, who we should be asking, and that we should never, ever just accept what we're told without double checking it ourselves.

One of the hardest things for me is to actually go to all of my classes. I'm married and have two children at home, a 5-year-old son and a 4-month-old daughter, and right now I'm pregnant with our third child. So believe me, every class I make it to is a big deal.

I feel proud, because I know how hard I worked to keep my life organized enough to be there and prepared.

College is the first real situation where we are responsible for getting ourselves out of the house on time.

It's not like high school where our parents were there to make sure we actually got up and went to school-here, no one cares what we do, and no one is here to help. College teaches us how to self-motivate and schedule our lives so that we can accomplish our goals.

One summer, I took a class with an especially dry subject matter. Sitting through lecture after lecture taken nearly verbatim from the chapter we were just quizzed on was absolutely numbing. What are we paying professors for if all they do is put the textbook up on PowerPoint and read it to us? Ten hours a week, wasted.

As much as that bothers me, having to listen as a professor slips in thinly veiled political agenda is far worse. Now, I am actually paying to be subjected to someone else's political ideas that have nothing to do with the material and almost always differ from my own.

What do these two insanely frustrating circumstances teach students? Perhaps the most valuable lesson of all.

They teach us that if we want to be successful, sometimes we have to play by someone else's rules. Give the professor what they want, get your A and move on. Learning to play the game when we need to, and attack at only the right moment is one thing that makes college worth all the debt we've put ourselves in to be here.

So, even if none of that horrible math we had to learn, or those passages we had to memorize will help us in the future, in the end we still come out ahead.