Frustration

College and the importance thereof.  Or not.

Why is it that you go to school for half of your life, then you go back to school (college) for another half of your life to learn about crap you could really care less about?  On top of that, half of it is useless, time consuming items that could be well spent doing something else.  This is just part of the confusions and frustrations I’ve been dealing with the past few days.

Over the past several years, I’ve been pretty good at computers.  They come naturally to me.  I’m not good with all aspects of computing, of course, but I can manage to do just about what basic book sense professionals can do (only in about one-fifth of the amount of time it’d take them to run through their book-sense procedures).  I’m just stating the facts of life and how I’ve seen it played out at work and other jobs I’ve done online and such.  If I can’t figure something out I’ll spend literally hours trying to figure it out.  Normally I’ll either do exactly what I wanted to do, or make a work around that would do what I wanted it to do (such as with things I don’t know much about: databases and *nix-based operating systems).

Anyway, I say all that because I’m downright bored with college.  All I’m learning about is how to write a several page essay paper on something I could care less about reading, much less responding to or do research and then respond to an essay.  However, with that said, I do like reading and writing.  I don’t even mind the occasional two-page analytical essay about something I read.  What I do not like is writing several of them per class, not having a clear example of how to write it (to that instructors specifications), and ones requiring me to write pages and pages on end about something that could have been expressed in one to two pages — tops.

Next is math.  I love math.  The thing I don’t like about it is learning the specific formulas and then being taught something in 45 minutes, which should have taken at least 3 hours to discuss.  I don’t learn by watching and doing later.  I learn by watching, trying to do it in class, and then seeing where I screwed up, so I can go back and make the needed corrections.

Technically, the only way I know I may be able to get an okay job is to put up with this nonsense for another few years.  I’m not sure that I’ll get a good job then though.  I’ve seriously been considering going through the process of changing my major here lately too.  I like programming, but I like doing it alone (in other words, I hate looking at others code and hacking it).  I like server and database administration.  I like web-based computing (as that’s really what all of my experience thus far has been in).

The dream I have with a career involves a little bit of computers and a little bit of church.  I want to be involved in the church someway.  I also want to be involved in this community in someway.  I wish something could come up where I could work around here — contract — with various computer needs of local area businesses.  There must be someone that needs some help, somehow.  I really don’t know how to do that though.  Advertising is not my speciality.  Not in the least.

It often seems that the hope I have for that is just utterly hopeless.  I’m not sure anyone really thinks it can happen.  It might be true.  I’m trying to trust God.  I’m just worried about not passing my core classes …

… and that’s rarely ever a joyful place to be.