2008 Woodie Awards
A good schedule is hard to find
Marshall Estes
Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: Opinion
As I walked down the walking path so graciously provided by the university, I began to wonder why it was so important to get those classes. Granted, I do need them to graduate, but it still seemed, well, silly to get up at such an ungodly hour. I think the real reason was that, simply, I didn't want to stay in school an extra semester, and I was willing to lose sleep to make sure that didn't happen.
Getting up early to enroll for a class is a prime metaphor for the general college experience (at least in the academic sense; staying up late when I should have gone to bed early is a metaphor for college life in the social sense). It's delayed gratification, doing something you don't want to do now to reap benefits later on. Which is what college life is all about. No one really wants to write a paper or study for a test in lieu of going out, but we do it anyway because we want to get a good job later in life.
Of course, the problem is, how can we know that the gratification we're delaying will really be gratifying? Maybe it will be like going to get "Juno" at midnight. I have my expectations, but there's no promise that they'll get fulfilled. I may hate construction techniques, or modern epic fantasy. I may go to class filled with an uncontrollable loathing toward them. Or, even worse, I might have spent four years working toward a degree, and end up hating the field I'm going into. There's no guarantee, but I'm doing it anyway. So maybe I'm waking up way too early to get into a class I'll end up hating, but that's life. The best I can do is to get up early and hope for the best.
Getting up early to enroll for a class is a prime metaphor for the general college experience (at least in the academic sense; staying up late when I should have gone to bed early is a metaphor for college life in the social sense). It's delayed gratification, doing something you don't want to do now to reap benefits later on. Which is what college life is all about. No one really wants to write a paper or study for a test in lieu of going out, but we do it anyway because we want to get a good job later in life.
Of course, the problem is, how can we know that the gratification we're delaying will really be gratifying? Maybe it will be like going to get "Juno" at midnight. I have my expectations, but there's no promise that they'll get fulfilled. I may hate construction techniques, or modern epic fantasy. I may go to class filled with an uncontrollable loathing toward them. Or, even worse, I might have spent four years working toward a degree, and end up hating the field I'm going into. There's no guarantee, but I'm doing it anyway. So maybe I'm waking up way too early to get into a class I'll end up hating, but that's life. The best I can do is to get up early and hope for the best.
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