Was It Worth It?

After spending four years on a task, it’s probably inevitable that one wonders whether all the stress and hardship was really worth it. So I’ve been thinking about college now that I’m really done with it.

I could look back on my college career and say that I didn’t learn a whole lot that I can use. I certainly spent a lot of time becoming familiar with Java, a language with, perhaps, a questionable future. I learned how to program a Beboputer and I wrote a paper on the (now defunct) BeOS. Sure, I took a class on databases and learned some Oracle, but I’m not sure how much of it I remember.

My experience with General Education is littered with failures (like my health class). Why didn’t I just skip school and get a job doing what I’ll start doing in two months anyway?

Pondering a question like that really makes apparent the true purpose of college. I don’t want to minimize the effect of college on my knowledge base, or my ability to learn new things, but the biggest effect going to four years of college had on me was entirely internal. I am a completely different person now than I was four years ago, and there’s no way I’d be where (or who) I am today if I hadn’t had the experiences I had at JMU. Again, I don’t want to minimize the educational aspect of college, but I found the woman with whom I want to share the rest of my life: that alone was worth the price of admission.

And so it is in that spirit that I roll out my new design for Maximum Aardvark. It’s not perfect, as I still need to finish a few details and work some mod_rewrite voodoo to preserve my old permalinks, but it was time to stop stalling and get something out here. It’s always been a work in progress anyway, and it’ll never be perfect, but we’ve all got to start somewhere.

May 12, 2004 - 01:59 AM

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