You name it, we gripe about it. It’s our very nature.
We gripe about parking, class sizes, and the elite few have the added burden of griping about not having air conditioning in their dorm rooms.
I’ve heard about every possible complaint that has rode the wind through the stately oaks and broad magnolias of our university: the food is terrible, the food is expensive, and Thanksgiving break isn’t long enough.
Even the animals complain. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong, but being pelted with acorns by a squirrel once let me know that even the tiny woodland creatures here aren’t always completely happy with their situation.
For the most part, the complaints being thrown around have at least a little credence. Interestingly enough, the one complaint I disagree with most once had me as its biggest proponent.
I once interviewed a student for a class who said that he hated that the curriculum at LSU requires us to take classes not directly associated with our degree field.
Amen, brother. I’ll drink to that.
I first came to LSU as a student in the fall of 1998. I had spent my senior year of high school working for my hometown newspaper. Common sense should have told me to come to LSU and major in what I was good at, journalism. Common sense has never been my strong suit, so I decided to test the waters a bit.
Five majors later, I came to my senses and I’m finally about to graduate. But through my first five years here, I can’t even begin to guess how many times I muttered under my breath, “Man, if they didn’t make me take all these dumb classes, I’d have my degree in (English, Political Science, Accounting, Marketing, Journalism) by now.
I guess a little life experience has shown me how wrong I was to complain. To give you some idea, when I first came to LSU this year’s freshman class was in 8th grade. While they were hoping their parents would let them slip some booze into their eggnog, I was doubled over a toilet in a hotel room on Bourbon Street “celebrating” the end of my first semester with something the locals called a hand grenade.
While they sat in sex ed class, I was researching a paper for my English 1002 class on why the designated hitter is bad for baseball.
While they were sleeping comfortably in their own bedrooms, I was sweating to death with no aid but a box fan in the dorm-turned-Journalism School we affectionately called “Johnston Hell.” To sleep, perchance to dream.
Did you catch that?
Over the course of three paragraphs, I talked about vomiting, sports and then quoted Shakespeare.
That’s what happens when journalism majors don’t spend all their time in journalism classes, and when engineering majors don’t spend all their time in engineering classes, and when education majors don’t spend all their time coloring, um, I mean in education classes.
We become well-rounded and able to hold intelligent conversations with people. We don’t take these classes because the administration at LSU wants its students to be the best Trivial Pursuit players in the world (although it is a nice perk). We do it because in the long run, we’re better off because of it.
When you leave here, as I hope to do some day, you’ll be able to do cool things like talk about how the Egyptians came up with rudimentary geometry, and you’ll know what rudimentary means.
Heck, if you want to, you can talk about the exit velocity of a large quantity of liquor leaving the body.
It’s fast, I’ll tell you that much.