Angela Harlem said:
leave princess meredith out this, kim! she has a right to an education! and a mercedes!
did the fish live? i forgot to ask you.
it's still alive. i'm quite amazed, honestly.
seriously:
i live in a college town. there are three schools (three very different schools) in amherst, MA, and then smith college is across the river in northampton, mount holyoke over the mountain (not much of a mountain, it's really just a big hill, but they call it a mountain) in south hadley. a couple community colleges in the area, and springfield, MA is only 30-40 min away. but my town in particular is crawling with college kids, and then clears out for the most part during the summer. college kids think they own the place, they think they're entitled to everything. sure, this sweeping generalization doesn't account for what unforgettablefirefox was talking about - the kid who has to work part-time at the minmum to be able to go to school. i'm talking about the rich fucks at amherst college, or hampshire college, hell, even the vast majority of the kids at UMASS (where i go to school). they're no different than high school kids who think you go to elementary school, then to high school, then to college, and then you're set up with a nice job once you graduate. that's not reality, but it becomes reality for too many kids. uncle joe's company gives them a job when they finally graduate after 5 years of partying.
studying a subject you don't like is stupid. sometimes there's nothing you can do about it, though. there are so many subjects that i'm really interested in studying, but then when i take a class, the material is either so dumbed-down (for the morons who spend all their time partying and can't string two grammatical sentences together to save their life) and boring, or i find that i'm not really interested after all. in the bureacratic mess that is the university of massachusetts (amherst, anyway), pre-major advising didn't do squat to help me figure out what i wanted to do. i declared a russian studies major as a last result, based on the fact that i studied the language in high school, was taking courses over at amherst college (i can do that as a university student. that's probably one of the best things about going to school here), and had taken a couple russian lit and culture classes to satisfy some random general education requirements.
it's ridiculous. i'm taking a biology class right now because i'm required to take some kind of bio class in my 4 years here. it's a non-science major bio of cancer & AIDS course, a large lecture of about 300 students. the lectures are so boring, and the presentation of the material is so basic, that i'm getting a B with almost never going to class. seriously, i've gone to four classes, and i fell asleep or left early during three of those. the exam questions are common knowledge, or just facts i've picked up from other classes over the years. hell, fictional non-reality-based medical tv shows (well, 'house' anyway) don't feel the need to define as many basic concepts as my idiot professor does. but still, there are kids failing the course because college kids are stupid.
i could rant more, but i've said more than enough already.