As finals begin next week, I feel many of my fellow students can share this sentiment:
I’m tired.

I sat down to type 15 pages worth of papers for different classes last night, and it hit me in the face. I’m exhausted. But not for all the reasons you may think. I am more than physically and mentally exhausted.
I transferred here from UNL for a multitude of reasons. One of the biggest being that I didn’t like being a number.

Because of my own feelings, I didn’t perform well academically, and then I became one of “those students.” That student that is not stupid and knows their stuff, but just isn’t passionate about the curriculum of the class.

You know “that student.” Every classroom has one. Or several.

UNL is considered a research institution which, good for them and all, didn’t help my feeling of being “that student.”

There were professors there more concerned with their research than their students. Often I felt like not only was I “that student” I was “research experiment 20.”

I didn’t come to college to become an experiment. I came to learn the information I needed to know to begin my career.

When I transferred to Wayne, I had high hopes. Both of my parents graduated from here, as did my sister, and they all enjoyed their experience on the whole. At first I did too. The professors seemed very personable, and I call almost all of my professors by their first name.

Then I had a few problems.

I entered my fourth year of college, my first year at WSC, as a second semester freshman. As I now contemplate the second semester of my sixth and final year of college, I am still baffled by that.

“We can’t accept your Agricultural Economics class.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s Agricultural Economics. Agricultural.”

“… And? It’s still economics.”

“I can’t let you transfer this history class in place of Gen Ed history. It’s too advanced. I mean, it was an intense course, clearly. You just learned too much.”

I had more than 100 credits stacked up from UNL and transferred easily less than 20.

So, students and faculty, I am tired.

I am tired of not being given credit for what I know. I am tired of the classes I need only being offered once every two years. I am tired of professors more concerned with personal projects and research than their students. I am tired of paying an educational institution that dismissed an instructor who clearly does care about the future of their students and will not allow her to set foot back on campus.

And I am tired of even having to have this conversation.

This is not a fight we should have to have. I should be able to come here and pay to get educated in what it takes to make a career out of my field. Yet some curricula and pieces of equipment are so outdated that I find myself asking, “what am I even learning? What am I paying this place for?” Some of the things I learn here I will never use in my field.

But who knows.

Maybe these are just the ramblings of someone who doesn’t like not getting what they paid for.

After all, I am very tired.