Make your time here worth it: do the work

Issue 26, Leo Fefer, opinions, Opinion - By Sean Bahar on Thursday, April 19, 2012 - 04:14

Before coming to college, we are all privy to exciting tales that build excitement for the college experience. There will be partying, there will be sex and there will be drinking. Therefore, many students come expecting a year of extravagant festivities to be remembered blurrily for the rest of their lives. It also seems many times that this idea of the college experience overpowers the other aspects of college that are perhaps more important, if not vital, to the real college experience.

Late nights studying, stressing about finals and engaging in new academic experiences that challenge the intellect and open the mind are perhaps less exciting and certainly less glorified components of college that seem to get left out of the “college experience” we heard about in high school.

I am in no way against partying. I am in no way against being social. But looking back on my first year of college, I am forced to question the motivations of some of my peers for attending a four-year college.

Before I came to college, I spent a year of mostly drunken shenanigans. Then I put on my proverbial big boy pants and came to Whittier. I don’t get straight A’s, but I try my hardest to attend all my classes and participate in as many extracurricular activities as I can in order to take full advantage of my college experience.

Tuition at Whittier is roughly $40,000 and, therefore, I am surprised when I find my classmates sleeping through class, blowing off major assignments and coming to class unprepared for weeks in a row.

I don’t think myself any holier than my classmates, but I do feel that many of my peers and I have very different ideas about what priorities should be in college. This was brought home a few weeks ago when one of my friends who I see constantly partying throughout the week and sleeping during English class said, “This school work is killing me.” I wanted to ask him if he really thought it was the school work, or whether, just maybe, the number of raves he goes to and the substances he consumes on an almost nightly basis could have something to do with it.
I think that the idea of the “college experience” is evolving into something that it was initially not intended to be. Before college I played on men’s soccer team with a few graduates of University of Colorado and Oregon. They would often regale me with comical descriptions of drunken nights and frat parties. Their stories were awesome, but when I asked them how often they did this they said it was a weekend thing. Now this is not a blanket statement for all students, but today there are many students who have taken the college party experience to a whole new level.

It is not uncommon for me to hear about my fellow students getting blackout drunk several nights of the week. After only a few weeks it stopped being a surprise when ambulances came to pick up a drunken student. And I don’t remember a weekend when the bathroom has not been vomited in multiple times.

Here is my opinion: if I wanted to go to school to party every night, I would probably go to a community college where I wasn’t spending $40,000 on failing several classes. The year is coming to a close and I think this is a good time for every student to evaluate his or her last two semesters. Questions students should be asking themselves are: how is my education shaping up? What am I getting out of college? Is my experience worth $40,000?