Andrew D. Anderson »

Every year that I’ve been at the UofC we get these lame letters asking us to relate our life and experience at the University to donors or prospective students. I don’t ever participate, as I’m sure that my statements would be heavily censored. Institutionalized education is a big racket; that’s true everywhere – its just more miserable here. If life is misery, then they do well to prepare you at the UofC. If you think you may want something else, go somewhere else.

Rant aside, if you’d like to see the real misery, boredom, hopelessness, and outlets that the University of Chicago provides its students… I advise you to look here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/collections/72157622661408694/

It’s a great set of real graffiti from the university. By the looks of it – completely uncensored. It’s probably not very reassuring, but it’s closer to truth than the propaganda the admissions department puts out.

Hey, but look on the bright side… you’ll be a well paid worker-bee when you’re all done with your time in hell.

P.S.
I stumbled on this other site that has a real and current discussion of the UofC as an educational option. It may be useful for some of some of you parents weighing in on your child’s university education:
http://therealrevo.com/blog/?p=14506

I’m not sure that it is very reassuring as an indication of career prospects, but that depends greatly on perspective. What I am sure of is that it raises some very important questions. Read:

http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0910/arts_sciences/philosopher.shtml

it’s worth the time, in my opinion.

Specifically, I think that the Subject hits a few ideas right on the head. Most importantly, to me:

“Too often,” he declares, “the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men.”

and, following close behind:

Rejecting the false dichotomy between thinking and doing …

I’ve got another six months of institutionalized education, and then it’s off to the “real world”. That fact has me thinking about what I want to do, where I want to go, what kind of a person I should struggle to be. (I’m convinced that in a capitalistic system “being” is a struggle.) A mode of thinking that’s always been useful for me before is to look at what isn’t or shouldn’t be – and those thoughts leave me rejecting the corporate rat race. Sure, the money is nice – but the time stolen is irreplaceable. The exploitation is insulting and the alienation nauseating. I’m with Marx on at least one idea, alienation is not good: I want to have a connection with what I make. And I do want to make things. Those things don’t necessarily have to be tangible, but they ought to be perceptible.

There’s something about being a cog that just upsets my very being. The quote on “free men” speaks to me loudly and clearly. It’s hard for me to believe that the idea could ever be received with dismissal. Which leaves me wondering if it ever is, or if the more pressing demands of life (hunger, shelter, etc.) simply push the more philosophical and principal-based ‘necessities’ clear out of the picture.

To what extent must rigorous thought, freedom, and “success” be opposed? Clearly, there are some of us out there who simply reject the existence of the opposition as an insurmountable obstacle, but why is that so rare? (Why does the story usually go like: pick two.)

Food for thought… (foreshadowing my future, albeit in an externally-inaccessible way.)

So, I’m back in Chicago. Back in classes. Spanish is going well and Logic is quite fun. I was just sitting around thinking about the strange interpretation of if… then statements. In logic, they’re only ever false if the “if” part is true and the “then” part is false. For instance – imagine taking a business to court because they won’t refund your money despite the fact that they sold you inferior products and have the slogan :

If it’s the best in its class – then you bought it here and it comes with a 100% money-back guarantee!

Well, it turns out that, strictly speaking, they haven’t made their statement false by refusing to give you your money back. The antecedent is false – or so the assumption goes – so regardless of how the consequent turns out, the statement is logically true. Odd, you think…me too. I’m more in favor of pegging such statements as “maybe” or “unknown” statements. I’m not sure if I’ll be given that option this quarter.

It’s cold here. 37° F now. Rainy too. I’ll write more later.

In an attempt to quantify educational success, most colleges assign some numeric weight to letter grades. Most are weighted on a 4.0 scale. Now, it has been well documented that this indicator has been on the rise for years… which poses a few interesting questions. Are students getting smarter, is the curriculum getting easier, or are higher grades simply being given out more often for equivalent work? Embedded in those questions are other questions: how has GPA importance changed, how have professors’ attitudes changed, how has education itself changed? Aside from all of those questions one might ultimately ask… is the GPA even a useful quantification?

Now, answering that question – as a college student, with an assigned GPA – I may be slightly biased. The best I can do is try not to be. I claim that the GPA is a practically useless number in almost every regard, and here is why:

Someone looking at only your GPA has no information about grade distribution. Perhaps you were a poor mathematician, but in attempt to be a well-rounded English major you took mathematics class anyway. Doing poorly in that subset of discretionary classes is not immediately obvious by looking at your GPA alone. And how important is it? It is ambiguous (at least to me) if you should be penalized for refusing to study as narrowly as a 4.0 English major. Even the “Major GPA” can be manipulated through lenient instructor selection or lower level courses.

Realizing that a transcript is often supplementary to any GPA, one can still make the case that too much relevant information is unavailable. What type of work the course involved, how assignments were weighted, grading trends of the professor. None of these are available to someone looking at a GPA, with or without a transcript. The roles that so many variables play in a student’s eventual GPA are condensed into a mostly information-less number. What is worse, it that this number is used to benchmark students. (It would likely a better benchmark of instructor or institutional trends.)

This has been a cause for concern for me since well before college. I knew many highly ranked (high GPA) students that were capable only of “regurgitation” – no original thought. They were poor problem solvers, but good test-takers. I am beginning to see that the issue does not vanish at the end of high school. As I look at the data across institutions, years, and majors – it seems painfully obvious to me that the GPA is not useful for comparing students. Yet it lingers, it stresses, it represents information it does not contain.

There needs to be an alternative for comparing student “progress”. I give the GPA a C-.

I apparently had no idea. Well, I had some vague thoughts – I knew I would not set out to study anything I love doing. Computer Science was off limits because I really enjoy learning about technology and programming. It is always exciting to explore and teach myself new things in that field. Start forcing me to study and my enjoyment melts away. It becomes a chore – a burden – another imposed aspect of life. So I vowed to refrain from structured – institutionalized – studying of technology.

I wavered back and forth, indeed enrolling in a few computer science courses over the past few years – and always being sorry I did. As I suspected, the regiment destroyed my internal desire to explore. No more computer science “classes” for me.

I set out to study something that I had no desire to ever pursue. I took advantage of the university’s reputation and picked economics as my major. Something I already disliked – and should I ever be in the very undesirable situation of having to employ my degree, I supposed a degree in economics might provide semi-lucrative.

That thought process – however skewed – had a very nice side-effect. Not only did it leave my love for technology mostly untarnished – it has just recently revealed to me something I likely would have never known otherwise, I am a very poor and obviously uninterested economist.

Consistently, those courses have yielded for me: poor grades, poor attendance, and occasionally even poor spirits. If I were ever to have to employ an economics degree in the future, I can most confidently say – I would starve first.

And so, perhaps the often overlooked, yet undeniably important skill, of folding must come into play. I must fold my plan of pursuing a degree in economics, before I spend another lackluster day working towards a piece of paper with the ability to seal me into a life I would surely not enjoy. I must act while I still have options on my side.

So, I have finally said it. I should have done that yesterday.

Now, to pick some other area of investigation. (because they do the mandate some “cohesive” program of study.)

Math, undeniably powerful and revealing – goes against my natural intuition at every chance it gets. Surely not making it impossible or even uninteresting for me to explore, my exploration is just painfully slow. Having already taken a wide offering of mathematics courses providing me a fairly solid mathematical foundation, I think it better to leave further investigations for independent study. Also, I am in want of a break from numbers for a while.

So, what have I left but humanities and some social sciences at this small university? And what good is a degree in philosophy (a subject I think I would very much enjoy), if I ever need to employ a degree? Would I be content spending a fifth year at this institution under any circumstances? Those are the questions I face tomorrow…