College (and High School): I Done Get Meself an Edumacation

Contributor: Paralith

I'm going to twist the prompt a little bit, and talk in general about my education, and not just college. As I mentioned in my post on The Plan, when I was very young, I was quite sure that I wanted to be a zoologist, loved animals, watched nature documentaries for fun, etc. My current career aspirations fit perfectly in line with these childhood interests, but it's only been that way for the past few years. In between third grade and my last year of college I waffled and wavered from this path, and I feel it was, overall, to my detriment.

During all four years of high school I took all of two biology classes, and I'm pretty sure that was the maximum number I could have taken. Every year had sciences of course, but the others were chemistry and physics, which while important fundamentals to the eventual study of biology, interest me far less. These were padded by multiple English and social science type classes, math (another important fundamental that is personally less interesting to me), and the art and writing elective classes of my choice. Oh, and a year of PE, which was and will probably continue to be the most physically fit year of my life.

Long story short, my exposure to the field which I am now pursuing was more or less nil. It doesn't help that biology is a vast field, and any high school class that attempts to cover the basics of ALL of it is inevitably destined to skim the surface. I still liked it, and had the vague premonition-esque feeling that my working career would ultimately depend on it. But I also had the idea that I might prefer to focus a good chunk of my college efforts on writing and art, and perhaps make my career out of those subjects instead. My previous post describes how that idea worked out - or rather, failed to work out.

The practical consequences of this, however, are that I more or less wasted a lot of time and effort that could have been put towards better preparing me for my chosen field. It didn't help that my stupid school doesn't even offer an English minor, so since I didn't want to go all the way with my major, all the English classes I took did squat for my diploma. If I had spent those class credits on biology prerequisite classes instead, I would have finished them earlier and would have had time to take some of those awesome looking upper level bio classes that I never got a chance to take.

Much more relevant to the Real World, however, was my education outside of class. I started working as a research assistant during the last semester of my junior year - and worked alongside freshmen. What a great start that would have been - to be a couple years along in my lab experience, and have more leverage to getting even more and better lab experiences, and probably fluffing up my resume quite nicely. I know for a fact that more experience in more things would have gotten me a job a lot faster. You can ask the employers who turned down my application in the first few months after I graduated. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a strong theoretical understanding is an important foundation to practical work, as well as learning how to think critically and write etc etc. But to actually get your foot in the door, to actually work your way in and advance yourself to the point where you actually get to use all that critical thinking ability, you need real practical experience. No question about it.

I realize that all this ranting and raving my seem somewhat hypocritical when compared to my post on The Plan, where I ranted and raved on the absurdity of being expected to know with certainty what your lifelong career is going to be from the time you're eleven. Trust me, I still think it's absurd, but I most certainly can't argue with the benefits of preparedness. If you can get a good idea of your interests a little earlier than the rest, then why not? And if schools and teachers are going to promote this trend, then they need to help students find their interests. They need to give students exposure to the possibilities. And I honestly feel that I did not get the right exposure. Hell, I probably didn't get the right exposure until I took a certain upper-level biology class during my junior year - and surprise surprise, it was shortly after that when I realized what I really want to do with my life.

I know it's not just me, either. Educational standards in the US are starting to slip behind that of other countries, particularly in the maths and sciences. I'll be honest and say I'm not sure what all the answers are, I'm not sure how to go about accomplishing some change, but change there needs to be. If there had been an option in my high school to take some more in-depth biology classes, I know I would have taken it in a heartbeat. But there was no such option. In college, if there had been some really interesting freshmen seminars that gave you exposure to more advanced topics without having to work through all the pre-req classes first, I most certainly would have taken them.

Additionally, as City Girl and Speak Coffee and I have had no choice but to learn, there is a lot about the Real World that our fancy college educations didn't prepare us for. Interviewing, networking, fighting to get your foot in that door. As Speak Coffee likes to say, employers out there expect vanilla, while your average liberal arts college likes to require their students to be well rounded flavor parades. Personally, I think partaking in many flavors is a good thing too - but employers don't agree. And we didn't expect that. I thought the transition into actual employment was going to be a smooth one. Nine jobless months taught me otherwise. I thought my lab experience at the university put me ahead of the game - only to learn that I wasn't ahead of the game enough. "Ah, so you can do DNA extraction and PCR? Wonderful! Well what about cell or tissue culture? No? Any experience with live animals? No? What about quantitative RT-PCR? Immunohistochemistry? Electron microscopy? None of that either, eh? Hmm, a year and a half in labs. That's all, huh." I thank my lucky stars for the job I had today; it was an accidental fluke that I even applied for it, and even luckier that my employer was more than willing to teach me much of what I needed to know on the job. Most others are not so cooperative.

I will certainly take a good chunk of the blame for my Lost Year blundering, as I know I had many of my own personal issues that held me back. But neither did my education prepare me as well as it could have, in many ways. For all the cost and all the time, some of the hardest and most important lessons I had to learn on my own. And maybe that's just the way it is - but I can't help but feel like it shouldn't have to be.