You can go to college from a pretty decent early education and end up feeling like you’re not learning a whole lot of new information. The degree of this experience is a large and varying one—but it is not uncommon.
As a technical college, you could walk into Sinclair knowing a lot of your intro courses’ materials. You could also start your first semester here as an Engineering student and have never opened an engineering book in your life. Whichever one of these is you, I have some advice: learning in the classroom does not consist of only the materials for that class.
Everyone has had that one class, at least, that they could sleep through and be satisfied with their performance. For many others, it’s an uphill battle both ways. If you’re in a moratorium state where you have no actual concept of where you’re going or what you’re doing in life, polls show you’re not alone and that it’s a fairly common situation.
You can be tempted to say a class is a waste of your time, that you won’t ever use it in your life or profession—the reality is, you’re probably not far off from the truth. However, college, like life, is made up of a considerably large portion where you do seemingly everything but what you want to. This doesn’t have to be a complete waste.
That’s character building. It’s like digging a hole for no reason other than you were told to do it. The results are: you know how to dig a hole pretty well now and you’ve had a lot of interior monologue. If you can do things when you see no point to them whatsoever and there generally is no rhyme or reason for doing it, you have developed an incredibly useful skill. It shows you can persevere.
Even with colleges being increasingly competitive institutions, often with tens of thousands of other equally qualified candidates for entry, it’s at least satisfying to be naïve enough to believe colleges do factor in that ability to persevere into admissions.
Other than academic hole-digging, simply attending an institute of higher education can give you an inside to the variety of types of people you will encounter the rest of your life.
You’ll see people who cheat get rewarded. You’ll see people having the rules bent for them. You’ll be held to a different standard than your peers, and unfairly so. You’ll notice the ways in which educational institutes operate—and they aren’t always fair or moral.
You’ll also have a unique experience with every new teacher. You’ll see what teachers that don’t care are like on a college level. You’ll also see the impact a great teacher can have on your college experience. You’ll see the political professors who teach with an agenda, the ones that look down on you and the kind that haven’t taken a step into the real world in seventy years—but will be happy to lecture you about it. The more knowledge you have on these types of people and the ways in which they operate on an institutional level, the better.
You’re going to see so many more types of people. If you want, you can ask yourself a bit about these people. Try noticing the attitudes of unhappy and unsuccessful people. Then, spin that one on yourself. Are you where you want to be? Your academic environment hardly consists of your course material. In reality, there are plenty of professions and careers in which you might not use almost anything from your higher educational institute.
Why is that? It’s because knowledge by itself is meaningless to most places of employment. It’s what you do with that knowledge and the experience that knowledge has given you.
Employers want someone with a good work ethic. They want someone who can handle real world situations. They want people who know how to work with all types of other people. They want people with ambition and solid performing ability. Sure, your course material can help teach some of that, but the learning really is up to you.
Don’t underestimate the power of the relationships you can form at Sinclair. This isn’t high school. This may only be a very small portion of the real world, but this portion contains a lot of useful connections that can lead to success on a personal or professional level down the line.
You know how hardly anyone from high school ever contacts you even though you said you’d be friends and stay in touch? Well, it’s pretty worthwhile to network here. At this point, everyone is generally working one or two jobs and striving for something as a career. Make friends and positive relationships here. Maybe you’ll even find your dream partner.
There really is not much else to the question “Are you going to succeed?” Are you, or are you not? I can tell you, 100 percent of the time, the world doesn’t care that someone’s dice rolled better than yours. The world won’t stop spinning because groups of people are in different positions than others.
It is incredibly easy to be lulled into a sedated state in academia, where we avoid the rest of the world as it keeps turning. We think and think and think while rarely doing, doping ourselves on our own comforts. Academia shouldn’t be shaping your thoughts, you should be.
When the doors close and you walk across the stage with your piece of paper, the door won’t hit you on the way out. You better be prepared to push open some new doors and to swallow some tough pills. If you walk out of Sinclair or any other institution and feel like you’ve learned nothing, you should take a better look.
Barton Kleen
Managing Editor