You can go to college from a pretty decent early education and end up feeling like you\u2019re not learning a whole lot of new information. The degree of this experience is a large and varying one\u2014but it is not uncommon.<\/p>\n
As a technical college, you could walk into Sinclair knowing a lot of your intro courses\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
Everyone has had that one class, at least, that they could sleep through and be satisfied with their performance. For many others, it\u2019s an uphill battle both ways. If you\u2019re in a moratorium state where you have no actual concept of where you\u2019re going or what you\u2019re doing in life, polls show you\u2019re not alone and that it\u2019s a fairly common situation.<\/p>\n
You can be tempted to say a class is a waste of your time, that you won\u2019t ever use it in your life or profession\u2014the reality is, you\u2019re 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\u2019t have to be a complete waste.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s character building. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
Even with colleges being increasingly competitive institutions, often with tens of thousands of other equally qualified candidates for entry, it\u2019s at least satisfying to be na\u00efve enough to believe colleges do factor in that ability to persevere into admissions.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll see people who cheat get rewarded. You\u2019ll see people having the rules bent for them. You\u2019ll be held to a different standard than your peers, and unfairly so. You\u2019ll notice the ways in which educational institutes operate\u2014and they aren\u2019t always fair or moral.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ll also have a unique experience with every new teacher. You\u2019ll see what teachers that don\u2019t care are like on a college level. You\u2019ll also see the impact a great teacher can have on your college experience. You\u2019ll see the political professors who teach with an agenda, the ones that look down on you and the kind that haven\u2019t taken a step into the real world in seventy years\u2014but 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.<\/p>\n
You\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
Why is that? It\u2019s because knowledge by itself is meaningless to most places of employment. It\u2019s what you do with that knowledge and the experience that knowledge has given you.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t underestimate the power of the relationships you can form at Sinclair. This isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
You know how hardly anyone from high school ever contacts you even though you said you\u2019d be friends and stay in touch? Well, it\u2019s 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\u2019ll even find your dream partner.<\/p>\n
There really is not much else to the question \u201cAre you going to succeed?\u201d Are you, or are you not? I can tell you, 100 percent of the time, the world doesn\u2019t care that someone\u2019s dice rolled better than yours. The world won\u2019t stop spinning because groups of people are in different positions than others.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t be shaping your thoughts, you should be.<\/p>\n
When the doors close and you walk across the stage with your piece of paper, the door won\u2019t 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\u2019ve learned nothing, you should take a better look.<\/p>\n
Barton Kleen<\/strong> You can go to college from a pretty decent early education and end up feeling like you\u2019re not learning a whole lot of new information. The degree of this experience is a large and varying one\u2014but it is not uncommon. As a technical college, you could walk into Sinclair knowing a lot of your intro […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[1999],"class_list":["post-13266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news","tag-barton-kleen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-3rY","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13267,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13266\/revisions\/13267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nManaging Editor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"