A Rocky Education

It had never occurred to me to think of myself as a college dropout.

I had been viewing my entire educational situation with a disdain caused by feeling completely reamed by the system. This wasn't entirely untrue. My only saving grace was that I hadn't paid a cent of my own money, but I had wasted a lot of my time.

When I graduated high school in 2002 I felt like my interests and skill sets were too broad to simply go to school for no reason. A liberal arts degree is basically a degree in “well-rounded-ness,” and I didn't see how dropping a bunch of money on that would help me to achieve my goals. Of course, at the time I didn't have much of an idea what my end goals really were, and was haughty enough to feel like there wasn't much that school had to offer me besides of a piece of paper. When you consider that back in high school I had a hard time being a good little hamster and running on the wheel like I should, I was hard pressed to put myself in debt to subject myself to this situation again.

To clarify, I once asked one of my teachers what the point of homework was and was told that it was there to help those students that didn't necessarily test well. This seemed wholly unfair to me. Here I was getting all A's on my tests but doing poorly in classes because of homework. I've always been a bit stubborn, particularly when I find something unfair, so being informed that homework was something of a grade crutch didn't do anything for my dedication.

It took me years after graduation to come up with a hair-brained scheme and decide that I needed an education to make it work. This in mind I decided to go to college as an Entepreneurship major. Although this was only supposed to be a two year associates program, I found myself half way through my second year with no graduation in sight. The school had accepted me into a major and then only offered the general requirements and no core classes. If they had been unable to run these classes due to enrollment in the major for only a semester or two, I may not have been angry. However, if over the course of four semesters at a two year school none of the required classes are offered, it is reasonable to assume that the student should have either not been accepted into that particular major, or been notified that she would be unable to complete her degree within that major. Because this was a two-year institution, the federal government decided that I should not have required financial aid for more than a two year period. All things considered, I did not re-enroll for the 2009-2010 school year.