5 Things the College Experience Taught Me
College is the place where you are molded into the person that will make you a subject matter expert in the field you will love growing your career in. Wrong. College is going to teach you a lot in your four years and the majority of it has nothing to do with anything on some syllabus. Upon graduation you are going to quickly learn some serious life lessons and view your college experience in a whole new light. You will find that most of what you learned is going to have come from the life experiences you were exposed to while you were busy focusing on things that turned out to be pointless.
Awesomely pointless.
Your Major is Practically Irrelevant
You are told to pick a major in something that interests you because this is what you will be doing the rest of your life. So you go into college thinking Business Administration or Political Science seem intriguing enough and you can just decide after a few classes to finally hone in on your Political Science major. You probably thought this was the moment of all moments in your life. You had set your future in motion, you were going to make a difference with all of this Political Science knowledge you chose to immerse yourself in. Maybe you were different than me and thought you would have made tons of money off this skill you had developed and be up to your ankles in wet porn stars by now.
Not quite there yet.
Whatever rationale drove you to choosing your path, it was your decision and you were going to make a difference in the world. The awful truth is that unless you are going to be a doctor, lawyer, or another specialized field, you had just majored in being really good at studying one topic and I wish you the best luck passing that off as a valuable skill in your nonexistent job interview fellow dreamer.
Hello future boss, allow me to science your politics for you.
C’s Get Degrees… and Jobs
At this point you will diverge on one of two paths. Either you are going to be bitter because you missed out on the foam party where your roommate nailed your perfect girl because she was just drunk enough that night and you missed out because you were studying, or you will rejoice because you are that roommate who blew off studying. The person that stayed in and worked their ass off got a 95% on the test and eventually graduated with a 3.55 GPA and was able to walk across the stage with a fresh cum laude all over their diploma.
Just… just, no.
Now this person will leverage their success into a position within their specialized major that will allow them to get the job they wanted and be happy. That is until they realize that their roommate also got a solid job with a GPA far below their hard earned grades. It is then when the moment sets in that as long as someone can manage to attain an interview and impress in that interview, they can completely bypass four years of hard work and end up in the same place. The truth is that a lot of employers are looking for intangibles and experience beyond what a number on a piece of paper can tell them. They see that the roommate completed their degree and has an electric personality that makes them a dynamic asset that they must have on the team.
Pikachu used Electric Personality… It’s super effective!
It is at this point that hard work and “doing the right thing” may have not been as important as what everyone had told you while growing up. “Oh well,” you think “at least karma will catch up to them and everything will make sense in the end.” Except…
Karma Has No Sense of Morality
Before college, the world mostly made sense. Karma seemed to be a real thing and in high school the bad guy usually got caught and punished in the end. Drugs were usually caught by parents, cheating was often noticed by teachers, and good grades usually followed hard work. Good was rewarded, bad was punished. The world seemed to make sense. Once you get to college you realize that the protective bubble that your community had created is gone. You are at the mercy of what karma truly is, the demon queen from Hell. You would stare directly into her eyes and know full well that she has zero concern for what you think.
And then he says, “What about common morals?”
It becomes all too apparent, once you get outside a protective bubble, that very good things happen to the worst of people and vice versa. Quite possibly the worst person I have ever met is allowed to live out a fantastic life filled with family and a great job. The biggest womanizers have been tested and are clean. Good students got jumped and ended up hospitalized walking back from the library, while thieves in locker rooms were never caught. Karma truly does not give two fucks about what you think.
Karma… obviously.
When karma takes a day off it leads to people taking advantage of the flawed system left behind. People like…
The Con Artist Wins
To some, college is hard work. These people go to the library and pay their dues to get good grades and roll that into future success. Other people prey on the kindness of others and treat everything like a game. These people will work twice as hard to avoid the straight and narrow way to a solution. The Con Artist will drive three states over for a copy of every test that they will eventually take in a class rather than study. The worst part about this strategy in the eyes of the people on the honest path is that it works, and it works very well and with karma caring about as much as either party of a one night stand, this person’s ability to scrounge solutions will continue to work after college. This asshole is going to be your boss some day and when that day comes they will call it “resourcefulness”.
All in a day’s work.
This person is playing a game that others are too afraid to play. The game is addicting and becomes habit all too easily. Perhaps others are just afraid of the consequences, but after awhile it certainly seems like they might just have it all figured out after all and the joke is on the rest of you.
The Human Liver is Miraculous
Quite possibly the most important lesson I learned from college is that science does not have a damn clue about what makes the liver work. There are books published on how they think it functions, but there is no way that the liver is not proof that black magic was real and the liver is what came out of it. No person should be able to process four years worth of binge drinking and the amount of rage filled hate fucking of the liver that goes on and live to tell the tale. The liver should put on its hat and coat and bid the host person a good day for that kind of treatment.
Kindly fuck off.
You will find that this has prepared you for much of the rest of life when your liver continues to take a beating when you realize you are at least a little bit of all of the above truths. So sit back, have a beer, and remember why it was all worth it. Fucking naps.
$100,000 well spent.
Musings of the Certifiable 