Your guess is as good as mine.

[gaskin]

Hey there. I'm still here... still in school despite the fact that I should have graduated by now. It's been quite a ride.

I realized today that by the end of this semester, I still won't have enough credits to be considered a "senior." This puts my estimated graduation date at December of 2008... that is, as long as I don't withdraw from any more

Comments

[doctorfedora]

It seems like a very large portion of our generation, at least those featuring some degree of introspection and the ability to reflect upon themselves, are having severe identity crises as they reach the end of college and enter the real world.

A large part of that is the fact that students today are all but expected to go to college, with a university degree now allegedly akin to what a high school diploma was years ago. I would argue that, rather, a university degree can be what a high school diploma basically is. I've met innumerable students who went to college primarily because they felt that they were expected to, and nearly all of them hit the B.A. track simply because it was most akin to the cruise through high school that they did largely on inertia.

The problem is this: a B.A. degree simply won't get you many jobs nowadays, between a bearish economy and the fact that there are just too damn many liberal arts students out there, and too many of them pressed on under the misguided conviction that prospective employers would give a damn about the fact that they studied poetry or fine art or whatever. I have a B.A. in each of English and Japanese, and the only reason I have a job right now that doesn't involve a name tag and baseball cap is because I focused on technical writing and editing during college, and have a reasonably strong Chemistry background from AP Chem in high school.

And then there's the growing army of liberal arts graduate students, perhaps the most useless segment of the American population. Their work is tautological in nature: the only value they can provide society through their studies is teaching other students who will likewise spend the rest of their lives in the self-congratulatory circle-jerk that is upper-level academia. It's rather telling that only M.A. students ever have to pay for grad school on the whole.

And yet my advice boils down to this: stay away from the real world for as long as you can. The 9-to-5 grind sucks, but you'd also be damned lucky to find a reasonably enjoyable job that still pays the student loans. I'm trapped, as it stands -- $550 a month in student loan repayments has a way of doing that.

It's a bit concerning that your graduation date is tentatively December, but maybe you could look into doing one severely hellish semester this Spring to get it over with, or a summer session or two? There are advantages to being out of college, truth be told. One of them is the JET Programme, which I'm currently looking into (long story short: assistant-teach English to Japanese school kids, get paid the equivalent of $48,000 a year with nationalized healthcare and subsidized housing. No Japanese language skill whatsoever required.). I want an escape from the world of the desk job, and I've only been there for a month now.

Best of luck. Try to avoid what I did -- don't slip into the easy refuge of bitterness aimed at the choice to get a B.A. degree. You're a smart guy, from what I've seen. You'll figure something out.