Sociology Major after all

Recently I learned that IU is doing away with their Continuing Studies program as of next year. This leaves me more than a little pissed. And why would that be? Read on...

So back when I was at IU, I had to take College Algebra as part of my pre-requisites to graduate. Fair enough, I thought. That level of algebra is very much a weak point of mine. I failed through it in high school and I managed to pass Basic Algebra back at VU after a few attempts and landing in a class that taught it entirely on a scientific calculator. My advisor at IU strongly recommended I take this class through the summer because it is shorter and quite easier, I was told. So I did that. And I failed it very early on. And I could not drop the class due to financial aid so I had to fail all the way through to the end. And of a class that started out with something like seventeen people, only five passed. And we had a teacher who could not ever explain correctly how these problems work, and would often get the wrong answer when doing it on the board and tell us he got the wrong answer and then say that it was fine since we know how to do it anyway. The teacher could not explain half the shit we had to learn in terms we could all understand, and the tutors at the math lab treated us like we were total morons for even asking how these problems work. I had never taken quite a beating before in my life.

So in the midst of all this, I went to the Continuing Studies program because it was my last ditch, I want the hell out of college with a goddamned degree, effort at finishing this thing that never seemed to end. Despite all the credit hours I already had, I had to take an additional 20 credit hours in order to get this degree. Were they pumping me for more money? Oh, you bet! With that, only six credit hours were necessary to complete a minor in Telecommunications. All the rest were blow-off classes, which was good as my GPA took quite the beating with an F due to that algebra class. I took a nutrition class which I got quite a bit of real world skills out of because it really helped me learn how to eat for size.

So I graduated with a degree that is useless in a concentration that is going away within a year. Isn't that special? So from here on, I am a Sociology major. That won't change anything with the usefulness of my degree but at least I feel that I can call it the degree I went there for to begin with. No one really checks that stuff so whatevs, I says.