And so, you went off to college. You trudged to and fro from lecture halls to classrooms. You sat in uncomfortable and close-knit seats and endured long hours of arduous lessons. You took notes off the overhead, off the Blackboard Web site, on whatever the professor happened to be mentioning, and copied them verbatim.

Then you looked at them for a long while on lazy Sunday afternoons and were tested on whether you remembered the pieces of information you wrote in your bland spiral notebooks.

Then you noticed off-handedly one day that you had passed your tests and were going to graduate.

With graduation came your degree ‘ a piece of parchment proving that you indeed went to college and copied down and memorized (at one point) all those notes. You got a job and went to work.

And after eight weeks of job initialization training you realized all those long hours spent copying notes and memorizing those bits and pieces of information through four years were for the most part useless.

So why come to college and sit in those stuffy lecture halls and hard seats with an absent-minded professor squawking about who knows what? The point is, your personal sphere of knowledge should not be restricted to the laughingly minuscule limits of a college classroom. The classroom is simply an instigator in which the professor attempts to initiate your thirst for more information, while only you are able to quench it. The tedious copying and memorizing of the philosophy of Marx, the proof of an integer or the sequencing of RNA indeed will never have to be known again outside of this University’s walls, however, the purpose of it all is purely to exercise your brain in an effort to instill a yearning, a desire, to know more about the truth of our everyday interactions, whether it be philosophical, mathematical or biological (in sense, an open mind). It is not about the grade, rather, college is about taking what you learn in the classroom and adding that to the context of reality. Sure the grade reflects how much time you have put in (with a few exceptions), yet they are severely misleading.

And so, the next time you attend class, do not sit idly and start writing in your puke-yellow spiral notebook the moment the overhead projector clicks on or when the chalk hits the blackboard. Instead, wait. Know and understand what you are copying down before you write it.

Do not believe everything you are told. Determine what really is, for your own sake.