This time around I’m pretty aggravated about this old guy that was in my class. Generally, I have no issue with old people enrolling in graduate courses – in fact, I encourage it! I hope to still be taking classes when I’m older. Why not? Who doesn’t love learning new stuff?

However, when I eventually take classes as an older guy, I have no intention of acting like this lunatic that was in my class this semester. This guy came off like a bumbling buffoon of an idiot with almost every comment he offered in the class.

You may remember that the last time I wrote one of these unnecessary complications diatribes I focused on an idiot girl in this same class. One of her major problems (aside from not being prepared for graduate study) was that she couldn’t properly communicate and she was enrolled in a communications program. Well, this guy has the same problem. Yet again I’m baffled by the severe lack of communication skills that the old guy in my class had. Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder about the level of rigor put into the application review for this program. Good Lord – it’s like they’ll let anyone in!

But here is an old guy who is enrolled in a communications-based program and he wouldn’t give presentations in front of the class. I repeat: he wouldn’t give presentations in front of the class! Meanwhile, his day job was working in a production studio teaching new hires for a local television channel how to operate the machinery and create graphics for the various screens. The guy worked as a presenter and instructor all day and he didn’t want to present or instruct for class assignments. What the heck type of sense does that make!?

Yet, that’s not the most aggravating part of this guy. No. In fact, what really bothered me about him was his obstinate attitude.

I remember one night when the Professor wanted to let everyone go 30 minutes early. We specifically didn’t take our regular “break” in what was a 3 hour class because we wanted to get out early. And just when the Professor was getting us ready to pack up and leave, this old asshole kept speaking and asking questions. Now, as an Adjunct Professor I would never discourage the continuation of a class discussion. However, as a guy with some common sense, I would have held my questions until after the class ended. Further, I would have asked questions that had some meaning. This guy extended our class by an additional 20 minutes (i.e. we only got out 10 minutes early) because he was asking about how the online message board system worked.

Seriously.

This guy kept us an extra 20 minutes because he wanted to talk about the finer points of an online message board! And what’s even more annoying is that the questions that he was asking were basic, easy to answer questions that had nothing to do with our topic of study. But still, the idiot felt the need to constantly repeat that he’s a cynic and he likes playing devil’s advocate. For what?! What exactly are you f’ing advocating for when you’re talking about whether or not an online submission gets to its final destination?! Honestly – what are you talking about you f’ing idiot?

This guy was a moron and I’m so glad that I don’t have to be in class with him any more. Idiot.

As you’re hanging out doing what you do tonight, know that at around 7:00pm EST tonight I’ll be ready to punch the wall in the classroom where I’m listening to an idiot prattle on in a program that she doesn’t want to be in and performing at a level that is unacceptable for even undergraduate work.

Well, I was right on target with that one. This girl was completely ridiculous last night. She may have said the word “like” two thousand times during the course of a 15 minute public conversation with the Professor. As I was trying to hold back my vomit, I refused to count the amount of times that she said “and stuff like that” and “you know.” I was, however, glad to see that the two women that sit in front of me in class were mocking this idiot, albeit amongst themselves. At least I’m not the only one who thinks that this dunce shouldn’t be in graduate school.

I honestly get so riled up over the fact that this idiot can’t speak in a communications program that I’ve thought about going to the Dean of the Graduate School to voice my concerns. She really is that unacceptable of a student – I’ve never seen a person who is less qualified to be pursuing an advanced degree except for maybe the girl who cried hateful, angry tears (see yesterday’s entry).

Oh, and the dummy girl is joined in her stupidity by an older guy who can’t read his environment worth a shit. More on this bozo in a future entry…

And tonight, giving the presentation won’t even annoy me. In fact, I like giving presentations because once I start presenting an issue I turn into one of these people that like to hear themselves talk. That’s the perfect quality for a presenter to have and I have that quality! What I will be annoyed at tonight, though, is this one moron girl who is enrolled in the same class as me. This girl (and I say “girl” because she is in no way mature enough to be termed a “woman”) is completely unprepared for graduate school work. I’ve been sitting on this entry for a while, but now I intend to share with you why this girl drives me absolutely crazy (and not in a hot, sexy way, either).

First, let me set the scene. As of Fall 2009, I enrolled in a graduate program at the local college where I teach. However, I first enrolled in this program way back in Fall 2003. I left the program after a single semester for a variety of reasons – one of which was that some of my classmates were incredibly unprepared for graduate level work and the thought of sharing the same degree with them made me sick.

Case in point: There was a girl in one of my classes back in Fall 2003 who was a complete freak show. I’m not sure what her disability was, but she cried at the drop of a dime. If you looked at her, she cried. If she raised her hand to answer a question and you called on her, she cried. If she raised her hand and someone else was called to answer the question, she cried. And it wasn’t a gentle weeping. No. This was an angry, frustrated, hateful type of crying – like she was hungry for your soul or some shit.

It was fucking scary.

One time I was assigned to the same group as this weirdo and I’m pretty much the nicest guy on the planet when it comes to working in groups (even though I, like every other graduate or undergraduate student, hate working in groups). The group had to divide up specific parts of the project to complete the work. Fine. Easy enough. Everyone knew that the crier was going to be a problem so we asked her what she wanted to do first. The tears started welling up and a look of incredulous rage came over this girl’s face. One of the women in the group became extra nice and sincere and helpful and told her that it was okay and that she could do whatever she wanted for the group if she just told us. Well… You would have thought that this other girl told the crier that she was a filthy cunt because the look on the crier’s face was the look you’d see on the face of a woman who just had her cat fall into a shredder. Her rage was palpable.

And that was her attitude in every class. She would have been better off enrolled in Michael Meyer’s School of Mass Murder.

Needless to say, I saw that a person like this was accepted into the graduate program and I told myself that I didn’t want to be associated with freaks like that in the job market. Thus, I went to Rutgers, earned my Masters Degree, and moved on.

But now I’m in this program again (because it’s free). I’m taking one class each semester and believe it or not, my class this semester takes place in the same room where I had class with the crier. Go figure.

I’ve surveyed my current classmates and they seem to be of a much higher quality than the group from back in Fall 2003, which is good to see. However, there is an idiot moron girl in this class who makes my fucking skin curl every time she speaks. Why, you ask? Imagine you’re in a graduate level class and you have an idiot who prefaces almost every comment with the word “like.” That’s what this girl does. Further, imagine that each sentence is trailed with either “you know” or “and stuff like that.” That’s what this idiot does. A typical sentence may sound like this:

“Like, what type of theory of communication should we research and stuff like that?”

What the fuck does that even mean?! And better yet – how is this asshole in a graduate program for communication!? Wait! I have the answer to that question because this bimbo told us why she’s there!

During the first class icebreaker/introductions (another waste of time), this dummy said that she’s in the class because her parents selected the program for her and are paying for her to go to graduate school. She went on to say that she didn’t want to go to graduate school, but her parents told her that they were going to pay for her to get an advanced degree to help her out in the job market, and stuff like that. The poor professor was baffled and didn’t know what to say; as a fellow professor sitting in the back of the room, I was shocked at what this girl was revealing to the class.

Frankly, everyone must have been surprised. One of her classmates asked her why she enrolled in a Masters Degree program when she didn’t want to do it, but the professor cut off Idiot Girl before she could respond. Folks, I gotta tell ya – this is the type of person that I would never, EVER hire! And if I was in charge of admissions at the local college, I would have never allowed this woman to get her dummy self in the door to begin with. This girl will be a black mark on the program that she’s in for years to come – mark my words.

It gets worse. So I have to give this presentation tonight. The assigned length of the presentation is 5 minutes. Fine – who can’t do a 5 minute presentation, right? THIS GIRL CAN’T DO A FIVE MINUTE PRESENTATION! In fact, when she gave her presentation a few weeks ago it lasted almost half an hour. As a professor, I appreciate when students go above and beyond, but this girl should have failed the assignment on time management alone. But wait…it still gets worse. Not only did this derelict go on for an additional 23 minutes beyond the time limit, she copied and pasted her entire research paper into the PowerPoint and those 23 minutes consisted of her reading the presentation word for word!

After the first 30 seconds of this bullshit my mind was blaring with: Unacceptable! Unacceptable! Failure! Failure!

If I was the professor of this class, I would have cut the student off at the ten minute mark and failed her immediately. And if she wanted more time, I would have publicly embarrassed her by saying that we can all read and we don’t need her to read her paper to us since it’s up on the PowerPoint screen (albeit it in fine print because she had WAY too much text on each slide).

Sooooo…

As you’re hanging out doing what you do tonight, know that at around 7:00pm EST tonight I’ll be ready to punch the wall in the classroom where I’m listening to an idiot prattle on in a program that she doesn’t want to be in and performing at a level that is unacceptable for even undergraduate work.

The impetus to write this entry comes from the fact that I often find myself ramping up my quality productivity as the day goes on. Sure, I hit the 3:00pm slump just like the rest of us (we’re actually biologically engineered to need a nap at 3:00pm – more on that in a coming entry). However, I find that as I begin to wind my day down from 9:30pm to 10:00pm, there are often times when I feel like I can really dig into a project and get something completed.

I’ve complained numerous times on this blog about how much I hate my commute. Not only is it physically draining and exhausting, but it eats up a large portion of each day. I think I’ve gotten to place now where I’m ready to pounce on certain action items at 10:00pm – once my body has recovered from the exhaustion of commuting and working all day. And while that might be good information for me to know, it is not necessarily something that I can act on when I have to get up again the next morning and get back to work!

I’ll figure something out. I think that an all-nighter (in my case, I’m talking about staying up until 2pm or 3pm) is necessary every once in a while, especially when you think you can knock out a bunch of tasks during that extra time frame.

Well, since I have some bills that need to be paid (i.e. student loans) and since I always thought that I would make a great teacher or Professor, I decided to accept an adjunct teaching post at the local college. It’s a lot of fun and you can usually come to this blog to read some of my observations with respect to teaching today’s undergraduate students.

Everything seems okay thus far, right? Good!

Well, one of the perks of teaching at the local college is that you can take a certain number of credits for free during the semester that you teach. Again, as I racked up over $120 thousand in student loan debt on my way to my MPP degree, it’s very hard for me to turn down the possibility of taking free classes that will ultimately lead to a graduate certificate in a discipline that I am interested in pursuing as a future career. Further, it is hard to say no to these free classes when they might also lead to me receiving a second Masters Degree in this same discipline. And yes, that would be a free Masters Degree…

Anyway, the unnecessary complication that is related to this scenario is the work that comes along with being a graduate student! I should fully explain this, though. I’m not suggesting that graduate students should do less work. In fact, I would argue that graduate students should do a higher difficulty level of work than the undergraduate student population. Makes sense, right? And I’m not saying that the work that I have to do in this graduate program is either too hard or too remedial. Actually, the two professors that I’ve chosen to take most of my classes with are excellent, former real world practitioners who “get” that graduate school isn’t about busy work. They assign projects that are of real use in the real world – and that’s really important if you ask me.

However, I think that I get a bit exasperated with the work that is assigned because of the fact that I already have an advanced degree. Maybe it’s an inner elitism or a subconscious knowledge that I don’t really need the additional graduate certificate or potential Masters Degree – I don’t know. On a conscious level, I do know that I don’t particularly have the time in an already overcrowded schedule to set aside hours for researching and writing papers.

But that’s what you get when you enter this type of program, so I won’t complain about the work associated with the classes too much. I will, however, complain about some other observations that I’ve made while being in this program…more on that to come in a future entry!

Personally, the biggest event for me in the last decade was my Father’s passing. I suppose that anyone who has lost a parent would understand how that’s a huge event in a person’s life. So in terms of what the biggest event of the last ten years was for me – it was definitely losing my Dad to Alzheimer’s and lung cancer.

However, let’s try to think happy thoughts as this year and this decade come to a close. Some big, happy events for me in the last ten years include being the first in my family to graduate from college and then the first in my family to graduate from Graduate School. Those two days were pretty great (although the undergraduate graduation ceremony itself wasn’t really that great since it was a downpour and they messed up the reserved parking for my family). I was also pretty excited to be my buddy’s best man at his wedding this past summer – so that ranks up there somewhere in the Top 10 moments of the last decade for me.

I’d also put the announcement that my older brother was engaged as well as my younger brother’s graduation from high school on that list (those events are always fun). I was also glad to be hired by the current company that I work for as well as the local college to do some teaching. I’ll be beginning the New Year teaching an online course at a second college, but I was hired by that college a few months ago so it still counts as an event for this decade.

The last decade also introduced me to the realities of trying to be healthy in a fast-paced professional world. I went from weighing some 385 pounds when I graduated college in 2003 to weighing 260 pounds by the summer of 2005 – that’s a 125 pound weight loss. I worked out and ate less (I didn’t really “diet” – I just controlled my portions) for about a year starting in March 2004 and ending with my gall bladder being removed in June 2005. My doctor told me that my gall bladder was creating huge gallstones because I lost too much weight too fast. You just can’t win, right? Since the summer of 2005, I’ve gained back about 80 pounds. I attribute that weight gain to getting hired full time in the summer of 2006 in a location that was an hour’s drive from my house. In other words, the two hours that I used to spend in the gym each day I now spend in the car…sitting…doing nothing. Not good. Plus, two or three nights during the week I wind up at the local college either taking a class or teaching a class. In the coming decade (really in the coming year), I have to figure out how to spend more time in the gym.

Finally, like the rest of America I would suggest that September 11th was a major turning point in all of our lives. It made us realize that there is real evil in this world and that those evil people don’t like the idea of America so they choose to attack that idea as it is manifested each and every day – in other words, they choose to attack innocent people.

Let’s hope for greater prosperity in 2010 and for the whole upcoming decade!

Whenever this comes up in a conversation, it’s usually a pretty depressing point in the discussion because it shows a severe lack of understanding as to what a college degree actually does for a person. Obtaining a piece of paper that says “Bachelors of the Arts” or “Bachelor of Science” in any particular discipline does not make you a know-it-all genius on that topic. Yeah, you may know more facts and figures than the average person, but that would be expected, right?

The real benefit of getting that piece of paper is gaining access to an opportunity. That’s right – access to opportunities is what that college degree gets you in the real world. How many times have you looked at job descriptions and they say, “Bachelor’s Degree required?” Even if you’ve seen that requirement just once, you’ve seen how that piece of paper can grant you access to an opportunity that non college graduates cannot access. It’s just the way the business world is these days.

That’s not to say that there aren’t a multitude of excellent, high-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. And many people from older generations would argue that the best way to gain better access to opportunities is to enter the military. I would probably agree with that for certain segments of the population today, too. But that doesn’t negate the fact that a college degree is a tremendous help in obtaining access to certain opportunities.

What many college graduates will tell you is that there are other benefits to going to college. In particular, they’d probably cite maturing socially and beginning to build a broad professional network as the top two non-academic benefits. These two benefits can be achieved in any number of ways including joining certain on-campus clubs, fraternities, sororities, student government, honor societies, etc. Those students that choose to engage in a meaningful dialogue with their professors outside of the classroom are probably the smartest students on campus. Why? Well, if you’re a young person starting out, why wouldn’t you want to connect with a professor who might have come from the business world and thus has a large network of seasoned professional contacts? Talk about an easy way to get an internship or a job out of college!

That aspect of the college experience has worked for me. I received my adjunct professor job through the recommendation of two former professors who I got to know outside of the classroom. One of them has also gotten me an online teaching position at a different university. I would have never been able to get these teaching gigs without the network that I built while in college.

There are a lot of aspects of college life that are beneficial to the eventual graduate (and even more benefits to the eventual masters degree graduate or doctoral graduate).

For those of you that don’t know, I started repaying my student loans about three years ago after I graduated from graduate school. In total, I racked up around $121,000 in student loan debt. That’s a pretty ridiculous number when you consider that the average student loan debt ranges between $15,000 and $35,000 (it depends on whether you get a bachelor’s degree or you go on for the masters and if you’re in-state vs. out-of-state). Anyway, my student loan debt is clearly head and shoulders above the averages.

But I’ve become pretty proficient with money and making money work for me in the last few years and, as a result, I’ve been able to overpay most of my monthly payments. So the big milestone that I hit is that my student loan debt is now “down” to $100,000! That’s some pretty impressive improvement when it was at $121,000 less than three years ago.

What’s frightening to think about is that if I didn’t have to pay rent since I graduated and if my old truck didn’t consistently breakdown before I donated it, I would have been able to overpay my student loans by another $30,000.. But hey, no reason to look back at that stuff when there is so much positive in the future.

Be on the lookout for another student loan milestone post coming soon when I break the six figure barrier and land in the five figure debt zone ($99,999 in debt). It’s coming quick!

This was a pretty fulfilling project as it gave me the opportunity to scan the vast majority of my photo collection – which has just been sitting in a plastic container for the last 12 years. It was also fun to do because I’ve now categorized my personal, electronic family photo albums ranging back to the mid-1990’s and covering Christmases, Thanksgivings, Graduations, High School Football Games, and so much more. Also, I’ve catalogued my electronic college and graduate school photo albums covering my time in Sigma Pi Fraternity, Greek Weeks, House Parties, Graduations, National Conferences, and more. I shouldn’t forget the high school photo galleries, though – there are prom pictures up there!

There are also a few hundred “random” pictures that I couldn’t find a category for and I’ll likely add even more randoms in the coming weeks. Anyway, thought that I’d share and that I would suggest everyone getting their photo albums in order…and not waiting over a decade to do it like I did!