Required courses are a nuisance

By Paula Ramsey

When we graduated high school, we were ready to venture on to college and work our way toward our future. Personally, as a journalism major, I was all too thrilled as an incoming freshman to take classes in the reading, writing and communication fields.

However, my excitement has progressively deteriorated as I have spent the last three semesters carefully working my way through biology, statistics and the always-useful bowling class. Welcome to the wonderful world of general education.

Each university is required to have their students take a certain amount of general education classes in an attempt to make them better educated and well-rounded.

That’s all fine and dandy, but I don’t see how my newfound knowledge of bowling qualifies me as an educated human being.

Don’t get me wrong, these subjects are helpful to some students — for instance, those who are undecided on their major. But as for the rest of us, is it really necessary to waste our time and money on material that is of absolutely no use to us? In quite a few cases, some of the classes are just filled with topics that are regurgitated from our past years of education.

Still, there are things that some of us will never understand, and will never need to. I don’t know how to find the square root of X minus Y divided by N plus A times pi, and quite frankly, I don’t care. I never have, and I never will.

I avoided all of the higher-level math classes in high school for a reason, yet here I am, adding on to the never-ending pile of college debt, thanks to the statistics class that I just “had” to take last semester.

College is expensive enough with the classes required for our majors, not to mention the price of books that you may or may not be able to sell back to the bookstore.

When you add in the extra expense of classes that include material that we will not benefit from in any way, shape, or form, it gets to be quite frustrating. And did I mention expensive?

I realize that there is nothing that can be done about this giant inconvenience, so in the meantime, I am going to look back and reflect on what I have gotten out of some of the general education classes that I have taken thus far.

Math and science are still not my strong suits, and I am still an awful bowler.