My college classes, ten years later.

Ten years later, my experience at the University of Florida is still eating shit.

I graduated from college ten years ago. If you read my old blog at all, you’d know that I characterize my time there as, more or less, an absolute nightmare in every conceivable way. To put it lightly.

In honor of the dubious anniversary, I thought I’d look back on some of the most prominent aspects of college and see if my complaints still hold up. You know, it’s possible my opinion has changed with ten years of hindsight. By that I mean it’s possible I’ll realize I was being too nice.

I want to start with the classes. As a journalism major, I actually found them to be mostly fine. While I had individual complaints here and there, they were nothing out of the ordinary for any college class: too much work, too much reading, subjects too difficult, professors not interesting enough. Overall, though, my studies themselves were probably the least offensive aspect of the whole college experience. They certainly weren’t life-changing, and you’ll never see a Dead Poets Society made after any of my professors, but they all did perfectly serviceable jobs teaching perfectly typical university material.

Hold on, though — UF educators and advisors, don’t congratulate yourselves just yet. I know you are. The school still earns a big, fundamental demerit from me for one important reason: they did not allow me to take all the classes I actually wanted.

I understand there may be differing points of view on this. Some people see their college experience as a degree-earning exercise, priding themselves on moving through the system quickly and winning the diploma with the least time, energy, and investment required. That’s fine for them. I think UF would mostly agree with that approach.

But I beg to differ. I think that while it makes sense to focus a college education on earning some kind of degree, it’s actually none of the school’s business what I spend my time doing so long as they are being paid for it. How profound and revolutionary: wanting to spend my experience learning about the subjects that I actually cared about. As an undeclared major, that was theater, music, and everything up and down the roster of humanities.

I tried to mix and match a random, directionless schedule – and my advisors HATED it. When I sought their required approval to take an introductory music theory course, they stared at me like I had seven heads.

Are you a music major?   No.
Are you considering becoming a music major?   No.
Then why do you want to take music theory?   Because I want to learn music theory.
Well, you can’t.

It’s not like I was taking someone’s spot (they didn’t check). I wasn’t intruding on some secret society of advanced educational techniques. It was a single, basic, beginner, freshman-level course to learn about musical scales and the staff. I was paying an institution to learn things, but they dictated what, when, and how much.

(Eventually, I was able to take a few of the kinds of classes I really wanted, but only when I lied and misled advisors into thinking I was considering becoming a major of whichever field they were a part of.)

After years of dicking around, I settled on the journalism track and figured I’d try to find the fun parts of that instead. After all, the classes were decent and the professors were capable enough.

What I couldn’t predict, unfortunately, was just how embarrassingly ill-equipped UF would leave me to start a career in journalism. You know, the whole point of being there?

I thought I had made the right compromise: I had traded my formless, directionless, pitiful undeclared major for a strict degree path dead set on churning out a worker bee. And yet, none of it translated to finding work in any conceivable way.

I work in the industry now, yes. But I do so despite UF’s education, not because of it. My college experience has been absolutely irrelevant to my career thereafter. In fact, it simply never comes up. It’s as meaningful to my work as my preschool education.

Yes, the courses were mostly informative and taught competently. No, memorizing textbook facts and figures does not lead to gainful employment.

I graduated without ever once reporting anything, interviewing anybody, writing or fact checking a news story, editing copy, studying or analyzing current news, working with photos, video, or other media relating to journalism, researching anything, or working in or around a newsroom environment. EVER. There were no labs, projects, fieldwork, or anything more elaborate than half-assed group PowerPoint presentations. The most we did was learn “about” journalism, the same way anyone could learn “about” any topic by reading a book or watching a YouTube video.

My degree was technically in “telecommunication,” under the journalism umbrella. No, I don’t know what the degree encompasses. I couldn't even tell you what the word means.

It’s not that I wasn’t applying myself fully or that I’ve forgotten the lessons. I was a straight-A student who barely missed a class in four years. And for my trouble, I graduated knowing NOTHING about working in the real world.

The classes in my degree track were lecture-based. ALL of them. There were no hands-on activities, no internship-type opportunities, nothing to approximate any kind of real-world journalism career at all. The professors would present material, you’d take notes, and at the end you’d sit for final exams. Maybe write a research paper or two. Nothing else. These classes were not prerequisites for anything further, they were the entirety of the major. We did not MAKE or PRODUCE or EXPERIENCE or CONNECT WITH anything — news-related or not.

I’d excuse even all of this if these lecture classes were somehow groundbreaking or thought-provoking in some unique way. They weren’t.

Complementing the journalism coursework were all the typical subjects, like history, English, economics, and science. But I also had three different social media classes whose only goal was to teach us (millennials) how to use Twitter. There was the politics discussion section that exalted our intelligence by quizzing us on the president’s name. The Spanish class whose online portal was broken three-quarters of the time. An astronomy class that never once had us look at the real night sky! An anthropology class where we were constantly made to play ridiculous games that did not tie into any course material. There was a sociology professor who would constantly show the class a photo of a baby and ask for commentary about it — while we all stayed absolutely silent. I had a semester spent watching a woman drone on and on about middle management three times a week. Oh, and there was the time I wasted an entire summer taking a single writing class that turned out to already be covered by my AP credit.

Nobody should pay for an education like this. This is like, NBC sitcom-level college antics.

Of course, I’m not complaining about easy courses or strange professors; every college has them. Everyone’s experienced wacko people doing weird stuff. But this is ALL there was. There was never a point where I transitioned over to the “real” classes, the “real” journalism I had signed up for. Never a moment where I thought, "Oh, this is what I'm here to learn!"

So why should I have moved across the state and paid thousands of dollars a semester to sit in a classroom and be lectured at? What’s the point of pursuing a diploma when a YouTube video or podcast can cover all of the same lessons, and beyond, in a more entertaining way, for free, anytime I want? Just say you went to any school you want, nobody checks. Any replacement-level university can teach textbook material and test students on it. Community college can do that. High school can do that. An app can do that. None of that leads to being employable in an actual career.

I’m no expert, but it seems to me you have a research university that is 150 years old, attended by tens of thousands of students, attracting professors from all over the world, calling itself the “flagship” Florida school — “the Harvard of the South.” You’d think that when dozens of journalism Ph. Ds are convening in one place to imbue their lives’ work upon eager students, they might have had a little more to offer than the same curriculum you can get from the University of Phoenix. Like, maybe, you know, working in actual news production in ANY capacity. Maybe putting together some kind of portfolio that could’ve helped me get ANY job. I work in radio now — while UF only got a student-led radio station a few years after I graduated. Just pathetic.

This is the point where the vultures will emerge from the woodwork to tell me that I should’ve “taken initiative,” “reached out to people,” “been proactive,” “worked harder,” or been more “competitive” or “ambitious.” No. Those are specific personality traits of a certain type-A personality that not everyone possesses. Forcing them on others is insensitive at best and ableism at worst. People without those type-A traits are already at a disadvantage in job prospects; they shouldn’t be shut out of a career opportunity because they “only” did exactly what was expected of them and nothing more.

I attended the school, passed the classes, earned high grades, paid attention, and did everything asked of me. I’m not saying that should guarantee me a Peabody Award, but if I’m paying the money and showing up and following the degree track exactly as directed, I think it’s the school’s responsibility to give me one iota of a chance to get a foot in the door. ANYWHERE.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the classes. They were whatever, I don’t remember or care anymore. ✍︎

P.S. If you want to know more about any of this, I documented a lot of it as it happened in Nonsense Report. Go visit, you'd be its first reader in a decade!