The Voice

Graduation can be really lame. Beyond the whole entry-level, poorly paying job search situation, there are things that can royally screw up what would other wise be a delightful time in one’s life.

Those of us who’ve taken out loans have the pleasure of sitting in on Financial Aid Exit Counseling. Imaging sitting in a room being told exactly how much money you’ve borrowed and exactly how much more you’ll be paying now that you’re graduating.

Spending the seemingly free money is easy, but being told that your debt will take years and years to pay makes that $25,000 per year job look that much more demeaning.

Exit counseling isn’t specific to GC&SU, but the graduation frenzy is. We couldn’t resist. We have to talk about it one more time.

Getting extra tickets must be the most impossible and time consuming procedure in history. Pick up the tickets at one office, go to another office between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. to register for the extra ticket lottery, then if you’re name is drawn you get an extra ticket. Right now, it looks like they’re handing tickets out one at a time, so the lottery is a multi-day process.

Those students lucky enough to graduate in the morning, sans the mid-day sun, are more likely to get those lottery tickets. There are fewer graduates in the morning, and, therefore, more tickets. Sounds like the school should have split the graduation a little more fairly. If it meant having more family members, schedules could be rearranged and more people from the afternoon ceremony could walk in the morning.

And this whole time we’re thinking graduation was supposed to be fun.

College graduation is often the cut-off point. No more money from parents, no more health insurance from parents and all those bills we tend to forget about are coming for us: cell phones, car payments, rent, gas, groceries, clothes… you name it, you pay for it. There are no Bobcat Cards in the real world… we’ll there are, but they usually come with a Visa or Mastercard sticker and take funds straight from your wallet.

Graduation is such a slap in the face. If you can’t perform on your job, you don’t get a D or an F that you can eventually make up. You get fired. Then you can’t pay your bills and the next thing you know, Rooms-to-Go is taking away that awesome new bedroom suit you financed.

All the griping aside, graduation is worth it. Just consider the alternatives: more classes, more tests, more poor college living (like the poor part is actually going to change) and even worse, lower paying job prospects.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 22 2005. Filed under Our Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry