BULLSHIT ONE CLASS, SELL YOUR SOUL FOR THE NEXT

It’s easy, in the last couple weeks of any term, to ask yourself, “Why, why in God’s good name am I doing this to myself?”

A glance at the calendar reveals too many assignments, most of them comprising a nausea-inducing portion of your final grade, all of them requiring annotated bibliographies, and not enough hours in the day to do them.

On top of all that, the view through the window in the final weeks of Spring Term is excruciatingly beautiful. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining, you can hear the flowers laughing dreamily to each other, and meanwhile you’re on your eighth cup of coffee, eyes bloodshot, spending your fifth straight hour under fluorescents, mixing up your flash cards, trying to memorize the bones in the wrist, trying to take deep breaths and delay your panic attack ’til you can at least make it to a bathroom stall, out of the public eye.

I repeat: Why do we do this to ourselves?

Honestly, I couldn’t tell you.

At least, I can’t tell you why you should do it.

I think it’s fucked up, honestly. This whole dog-and-pony show, the thousands of dollars invested, the sleep lost, the irrelevant information dutifully regurgitated, the pointless lectures suffered through, the time, the sheer time invested in chasing a degree that everyone tells you is necessary to obtain if you want to get anywhere in life.

There’s some solace, however: You didn’t spend the tens (sometimes hundreds) of thousands of dollars that everyone else you’re going to meet in your life did, with a degree borrowed from predatory lending agencies to finance their soul-crushing corporate job in finance or accounting. People will tell you for years to come that you made a smart choice, that they wish they’d done what you did. They will applaud your foresight, your sacrifice.

Because really, you have sacrificed. Say what you want about the facilities, the architecture, the faculty, the administration, the food, the lectures, the wi-fi, the resources, the books in the library, the student government (or lack thereof) – your concerns are valid, your gripes real, your frustration warranted.

And you made it, still, in spite of all the bullshit.

How many of you have looked enviously at the social media posts of your friends who went off to illustrious four-year universities and said to yourself, “Why couldn’t I have that?”

How many of you have made an impossible work schedule somehow, some way, work?

How many of you have gone straight from a shift to class? From class to a shift? Pulled doubles and gone to class?

How many of you have sacrificed sleep, food, a social life to do classwork, instead?

How many of you have had to raise a family and go to school at the same time?

How many of you have had to try and put your life together and go to school at the same time?

How many of you have invested your time, your money, your life into this institution?

These things, all of them, are yours. They are yours to own and you deserve to be proud of them.

Going and getting a degree isn’t about the degree – it’s about the getting of it.

It’s about being able to say that you put up with a lot of shit over a long period of time.

It’s about being able to say that you worked your ass off, to the point where you thought you had no more to give, and then gave more when it was asked of you.

It’s about discipline.

It’s about sacrifice.

It’s about hard work.

And, the knowledge that you are capable of hard things, that you can overcome a giant, heaping pile of shit and come out the other side on both feet, will stay with you much longer than any of the things you ever learned in class.