My college classes, ten years later.
annoying stuff, college, jared's life
Ten years later, after extended deliberation, analysis, and research, I've come to the same unbiased scientific conclusion I did at age 22: my experience at the University of Florida really did suck, just as I always knew it did.
I graduated from college in 2013. Those who know me well know that my time there was, 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 how well my complaints 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 my classes to be mostly fine. While I had individual nitpicks here and there, my issues were nothing out of the ordinary: there was too much work sometimes, too much reading, certain subjects were too difficult, professors weren't great at elevating the material. Overall, though, my studies themselves were probably the least offensive aspect of my whole college experience. They weren't great or memorable, and you'll never see a Dead Poets Society made after any of my professors, but they mostly did perfectly serviceable jobs teaching perfectly typical university material.
That may seem as though I'm putting a point on the board in UF's favor, but hold on. The school still earns a huge, fundamental demerit from me for one important reason: they did not allow me to take all the classes I actually wanted.
Now, I understand there may be differing points of view on this. Some people see the college experience as a degree-earning transaction, priding themselves on moving through the system quickly and with the least time, energy, and investment required. That's fine for them. I think UF itself would mostly agree with that approach.
But I beg to differ. While it's a good idea to focus 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. Is that profound and revolutionary, that I want to spend my experience learning about the subjects that I actually care about? For an undeclared major like me, those subjects were theater, music, and everything up and down the roster of humanities.
I tried to mix and match a random schedule that didn't fit a degree track – but that I wanted. 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 wasn't like I was taking someone's spot. 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 that apparently couldn't be accommodated. The school dictated what I would be allowed to learn, when, and to what degree.
(The only way I was able to take even a modicum of the subjects I wanted was by lying and misleading advisors into thinking I was considering becoming a major of whichever field they were a part of. I had no problem doing that, but I shouldn't have had to.)
After years of dicking around, I settled on the journalism track. Journalism was something that I actually was fairly interested in, and I always enjoyed writing. 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?
See, I thought I had made the right compromise: I chose a strict degree path with real, tangible jobs tied to it. I went the whole way, took all the required classes, and aced them. I was doing everything the school had relentlessly tried to drill into me.
And yet, none of it translated to finding work in any conceivable way. And I don't mean that the job market was bad — I mean that the school did not teach me anything necessary to even know how to DO a particular job, in any market.
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. It's as meaningful to my work as my preschool education.
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. People sometimes ask me what that means. I don't know. I still don't know what the degree was supposed to encompass.
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. Still, I graduated knowing NOTHING about working in the real world.
Every class in my degree track was lecture-based: that is, a professor lectured at you and you took notes. 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 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 a timid substitute made us 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 spent a semester 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.
I'm not saying I didn't learn anything. I am saying that none of this tied into the development of any kind of career, especially one in journalism.
I'm also not complaining about the courses being too easy or generic. Every college has some of that. 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 actually 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 material for free?
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 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 PhDs 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 — and for comparison, UF only got its first student-led radio station, something every other college in the country has, a few years after I graduated. It's 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” if i wanted to graduate with career prospects…
No. Those are specific personality traits of a certain type-A personality that not everyone possesses. You can't force them. People without those type-A traits are already at a disadvantage in the working world; they shouldn't be shut out of a career opportunity because they “only” did exactly what was expected of them and nothing more. And like I said, I'm not saying I should've been “gifted” a job position — just educated enough to be able to actually stand a chance with them on my own.
I attended the school, passed the classes, earned high grades, paid attention, and did everything asked of me. That shouldn't 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. ✍︎