Do You Get What You Pay For?

Reflections from a senior wanting to start again

EB

I’m a senior now, something that struck me like a bus as my last fall semester came to a close. Still, almost four years later, I haven’t the slightest idea whether I made the right decision to be here.

I can tell you this much-–I’m not a good student. I’m lazy. I procrastinate until the last minute, and I work myself up over and over again, flailing in an endless cycle of stress. I always seem to scrape by just at the last minute. Learning comes to me on my own terms, something I’ve been battling in my psyche for years.

These stresses were exponentially more difficult when faced with the biggest barrier to my college education—the cost of it all. I’ve worked 30, at times 40-hour weeks since my sophomore year just to afford my education, letting my academic endeavors fall short of what I know I’m capable of. Surely this is not the goal of higher education. What’s the purpose if you’re simply scraping by, not even getting the full experience?

Often, a degree can be written off as just a piece of paper. At the end of the day, I’ll graduate with this marker that says nothing about my character or ability any more than my peers. But with graduation on the horizon, I can’t help but look back on the things I have missed out on along the way–resources I worked hard to pay for but had no time to take part of.

Part of me wishes that I had taken a gap year to figure out what my passions truly are, so that I wouldn’t be stuck in a degree program I’m not satisfied with. I envy the times when I had the choice to be somewhere I wanted to be.