
23-04-2006, 22:45
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Team Mom and NEM
 FRC #0768 (TechnoWarriors); VEX #768)
Team Role: Mentor
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Rookie Year: 2002
Location: Baltimore, MD
Posts: 103
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Re: The promise of college for our generation
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Originally Posted by eugenebrooks
The goal of college is to get an education in a field of study that interests you. In the end, you likely have to go out and get a job so it is useful if the education serves this purpose as well, but if the education itself is not interesting to you a change of venue is in order.
One possible change of venue can be a change of major if you find that an alternative major stokes a fire in you. If your major is not doing that for you it is likely that any follow-on employment in the same field may not stoke a fire either, so a change in venue is all the more important.
If the rigors of college are something that you find unattractive enough to complain about, you should really consider an alternative. There are many career oriented "schools of specialization" that require only one or two years and that provide an attractive employment venue afterwards. There is nothing wrong with these alternatives if they are a fit for you.
I spent a great deal of time building electronic circuits as a teenager 35 years ago (many of these circuits used tubes), and went to college with a passion to become an electrical engineer. In spite of nearly straight As, I was quite bored with the general engineering curriculum and switched to Physics at the end of my first year. I learned, in college, that what I really had a passion for was understanding how physical things worked and I have stuck with it through a Phd, and ever since.
Actively hunt for your passion in college. Hunt your passion until you find a major that is so interesting that even a bad professor is not all that hard to bear. Find a topic of study that drops your jaw when you learn cool things.
For me, it was learning things like Maxwell's equations predicting the speed of light and why the sky is blue. For you, it is likely to be something different, but find your passion you can, and finding your passion is worth the effort that it takes. This is nothing new for today's generation. It has always been this way. If you can look back at your college days 30 years later, and still be thrilled at how cool the topic of study was, in spite of how hard it was, and still want to learn more about it, you are doing the right thing in college.
Seek out your passion, when you find it, it will be worth it...
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What wonderful advice - I hope everyone here memorizes it. It seems to me that this is the real reason FIRST exists, to expose students to subjects and ideas that might inspire some passion that will in turn become a career choice and in turn change our culture for the better, which is part of Dean's homework assignments for us all.
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