College

What colleges have you attended?

I have been enrolled in four different colleges, actually graduated from three of them. These include Alfred University, SUNY Orange, DeVry University, and Walden University. The most important thing I learned as a result of my time at various colleges is the fact that a piece of paper is just that – a piece of paper. A degree in no way, shape or form says anything definitive about what or how much you know about a given topic. It says everything about how well you perform on tests for that knowledge, but doing well on a test absolutely does not signify long term retention.

I have learned and retained far more from experience. In life, learning takes many forms. If you spend hours and hours in a class, take the exam, do well, great! But it is quite possible that in six months, a year, five years from that exam – you’ve forgotten half of what you remembered in order to do well on the exam in the first place. If you fuck something up that you are doing, you will learn more from that than you will from any number of hours spent in a classroom. Why? Because when you fail, you don’t forget why.

College is awesome, I learned a lot of things during my time in college, but only about half of it (and that’s generous) is related to the degrees I obtained. For example, I took an acting class as an elective, and learned more from that and the resulting experiences than I did from some of the “core”, required classes for the degree I was pursuing.

My father was a working man, a laborer. He grew up on a farm. He got horrible grades in high school, from an academic standpoint. But at the same time, he was one of the smartest men I have ever known. He asked me one time how long it would take to flood a field of some dimension to have a certain amount of standing water with a pump that had a flow rate of whatever it was. I was 11 or 12. I had no clue, but he explained me how to figure it out. It wasn’t until 10 years later, and about 6 years after he had passed, that I realized, when sitting in a Calculus 2 class, that he, an uneducated man by most standards, had explained calculus to his 12 year old daughter. My father did not know calculus. But he knew how to solve that problem.

I guess what it boils down to is that the best, most prestigious education that you can receive is from living life, doing things, trying things, failing, and persevering.