College: Watching Life from the Sidelines

Congratulations to all of the people that are finding out about the Steemit/DTube/DSound/DLive revolution. Because of these new platforms, people from around the world are making livings posting their vlogs, arts, musics, commentaries, gaming lives, traveling lives, shopping lives, and basically anything goes for anyone.

Except... this is a perspective coming from a person that is still trapped under the contemporary obligations of a society. I'm a university student and I'm slowly missing out on the opportunity of several lifetimes.

I thought I could make it work, you know? Last semester I took a shot at cryptocurrencies and doing my own thing for a while (during the semester because late 2017 waited for no one), and it flopped. Now, I have to get my grades back up while simultaneously having amazing ideas of what to make or post.

These ideas happen every day. But do you know what else happens with increasing frequency?

Bullshit. College bullshit.

Now, I would have no problem if my major (let's focus in on that for a second) taught us things in an organic fashion. They know we're here to get certified for programming, coding software, making apps, and to be competitive in the 21st century.

21st.

They have us learning about assembler languages from 40 years ago, as if we need that knowledge for any sort of thing beyond programming. MIPS would be relevant to me if I was making chips, maybe. Or programming calculators.

Or using this thing.

They have us multiplying 3 numbers using a simulator and its own programming language that there is basically zero support for outside of textbook knowledge. Stack overflow has people asking how to do basic adding, storing, etc, and the answers just involve looking at the textbook knowledge.

That's not all, though. Throughout my college time we've had to sign up for many different sites:

1. Pearson's MyLab site, where we basically pay 120 dollars to be asked several dozen questions a week in specific formats that make us point, type, drag and navigate through broken plugin errors.
2. WebAssign, where we buy an access key through the bookstore (and practically no other source, along with the 100+ dollar textbook) and we're asked homework questions usually involving math. (The thing about math problems is that you can solve almost any one of them with a google search.)
3. TopHat, where we pay 25 or so dollars to answer questions during class, but with our phones and laptops instead of the cheaper iClicker option that does the same thing with a specialized remote.

Accounts and more accounts -- forgotten passwords, my debit card information is probably all over the deep web.

They seem to love putting the financial burden on us for just about everything.

• Signed up for a class but the waitlist failed to enroll you? You have to withdraw from the class yourself and deal with missing credits impacting your financial aid.
• Got a D in a class you took in the past, but taking it again to improve the grade? Well, since you didn't get an F the first time, you'll have to pay out of pocket.
• Never went to the gym or campus hospital once this semester? Pay 200 dollars for the fee for upholding the service -- since they can't spend the money on you, they're building all sorts of new offices over the parking spaces you wanted more of to get to your classes.
• Also pay 260 dollars for this textbook because they made sure to shut down all of the online PDFs, changed the assessment questions in the new edition slightly from the last one, and padded on an access code so that you can't sell it after you're done with the class.

I ran it through my friends -- we're here for the degree. Even our families told us that much of what we learn and do and spend our time on in college will be nothing short of garbage.

• You're not going to remember MIPS or how to write binary decimal numbers or the best way to implement Merge Sort after the final. You don't care nor will you use it in whatever you do in the future (unless it's another class).
• You're not going to get your money back from that textbook, you're probably not getting any money from them unless you have to pay it all back later, or you want to work under them with some cashier job.
• You're not going to keep your notes because you only wrote them down once and only read through them twice.
• You're not even going to keep most of your friends, there's too much to do before you can hang with those people you like. The college is your buddy; they're giving you the shot in life.

So yes, we all have a reason to be here, but it's not a very good one, especially since the foundation of the world economic system is changing right under our feets. Our families are stuck in the past; my mother says that because I'm black, I need this degree for a good job, and for something to fall back on if this entire crypto thing is a lie and those jobs haven't been taken over by robots yet. Don't forget about us, though -- we're just monkeys being told what to think and how to operate, and we have to pay thousands for that, and that this is the way it is.

clearly.. there is something wrong here.

This is what I've been wanting to do with my life lately:

• Make more music
• Reconnect with friends
• Fix up my Steem robot
• Learn a few spanish words a day
• Read up on interesting cryptocurrencies and their developments.
• Watch and read more posts on Steemit and DTube
• Livestream and post videos of a game I like to play

Notice this list doesn't have (my upcoming homework assignments):

• Perform binary multiplication with only addition, and division with only subtraction
• Have my face tracked by a camera as I type an essay
• Buy a textbook purely because the powerpoints answer about 70% of the answers on our quizzes
• Fuss with my Java program when the most optimal code to do the same thing is already freely available online
• Listen to lectures all week spoken by teachers with thick accents, when I could learn the information faster without them but they announce exam dates and homework assignments only at those lectures.
• Just go out of my way every day to be shat on by a proven-to-not-work, overly complex system that erodes my money and replaces it with stress.

Do you want to know why I can't/don't want to leave?

Because it's either this or working part time jobs with very little job security. Crypto can't pay my bills yet. I can't do both what I want to do along with the assignments because the assignments take far more time than I'm willing to give up to maintain my sanity.

It's true that I could just bail out and have a few months to prove myself, but that's an unwise decision. It's also true that I could do none of what they tell me to do here, but that has already been damaging to my finances next semester.

I could also get the work done early in the days or during the week, and work on my projects during the weekend. But do you know how beat I am after dealing with their crap? This weekend my brain was worn out -- I barely wanted to move let alone make music to release yesterday. There's only a certain amount in me right now and 24 hours in a day. Something's gotta give.

We need money, we need a way out. Other friends of mine are doing worse -- they have jobs AND school, and they hardly have time to keep in touch with me. Is this really the long term investment we should be seeking? Is crypto going to be able to lift us struggling college students out of financial uncertainty?