Recently, I’ve overheard conversations between people about how they don’t feel they’re “getting their money’s worth out of college.”

I can relate. I’ve had the same thoughts, until I realized that it was my fault I wasn’t “getting my money’s worth.”

I didn’t go to class, a habit I’m still struggling with, so I never really learned the material. Staying up for 24 hours cramming for a midterm the next morning is by no means learning. But it’s what a large portion of my college career has consisted of.

However, after going to class I realized I really don’t have to study that hard if I do what’s expected of me. You know, reading (and that means, actually buying the text book) and participating in the educational process all together.

Not to mention, I would disregard professors, who are well learned in their area of academia, so much so that generally they have a Ph. D proving it. But because they presented an idea in class I didn’t necessarily agree with, I shut out how they could open my eyes.

I might not want to accept it when a professor says typically men get better jobs with higher pay than women. I want to believe I’m just as capable and have just as much of a chance to be the editor of a magazine as they do, which I do believe, but in the “real world” we’re supposed to be preparing for. I know that professor is probably right. As a student, I should learn to deal with that and hopefully, beat that statement.

And, I forgot how much I was learning just through personal experience. With that alone in the last few years, I’m not really sure how there’s ample space in my brain for the educational truths I’m supposed to be filing away as well.

You don’t get your money’s worth out of anything, unless you use it to your advantage.

The professors’ ideas I once shut out while sitting in their class, I have now realized that I’m seeing as truth as well as I notice myself applying them to decisions I make both in my major and outside of it.

Once you start disregarding how important you are, how your opinions and feelings are truth and begin allowing yourself to actually become a student, not just of academics-but of life- you know next-to-nothing.

Your roommates, peers, professors, family and, well, books can be the greatest source of knowledge on earth for you. Before deciding what you think about something, look at both sides and discover how you feel about it. Then you might not feel so cheated out of your college experience.

Tech might not be what you imagined college would be, but most of those opinions were probably formed by what you saw on “Saved by the Bell”- The College Years or “Old School”- both just as fictitious as my thinking I’ll stumble upon a “journalistic god” who will grant all of my writing dreams like William Miller in “Almost Famous.”

In general, everything is what you make of it. You determine the use value (see, I learned some economics) and you can’t put a price on that.

 

Jess Peregoy is a junior journalism major from Bossier City who serves as managing editor for The Tech Talk. Email comments to jep024@latech.edu.