Because professors are ALWAYS right...

There are two things in the academic world that I cannot stand.

One: Professors who are power-hungry and refuse to admit their mistakes.

Two: Getting a bad grade because power-hungry professors were not clear in explaining instructions.

No matter what university you attend, there will always be professors who spent too long getting an expensive degree only to end up back at their undergraduate alma mater teaching kids who just want to do better than them. Make no mistake, there is absolutely nothing wrong with teaching. "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge," said Albert Einstein, and he is exactly right. It should be every professor's goal to encourage students to go beyond what they accomplished and reach their full potential. However, it never fails that there are a handful of professors who hate to think that any of their students might think in a different way than them, perhaps coming to a conclusion that they never even imagined themselves. Often, these professors have a deep-rooted aversion to giving out an "A" since no one can possibly attain the amount of knowledge that they have. And when you question their grading scale?

CAUTION: DANGER AHEAD!

Questioning one of these professors is like walking into the House of Chanel in Paris wearing your recently-found economical (and honestly, sensible) pair of Walmart shoes. You will get shut down, and they will make you feel stupid. Do not be deterred, though. If you feel that the instructions were obscure, let them know. Perhaps, ever so cautiously, suggest that they make it clearer in the future. It might not salvage your grade, but it may help out some poor kid in the future. The sad truth is that there is virtually nothing we can do about these professors. They are stubborn and they will not change because we said something. The only possibility is to get to know them. Find out their likes and dislikes and then shamelessly write papers that adopt a position that they can appreciate. Maybe this is brown-nosing or "kissing-up" but I would rather do that then receive a poor grade from a professor that will never see my point-of-view. I'm that desperate. Consider it sleuthing and then using your sleuthing skills to achieve some type of advantage.

Until the day when these professors no longer consider students incompetent or ill-suited for their field, we will continue to love our favorite professors and appreciate their teaching style and equality of grading. After all, some of our professors are people that we will remember for the rest of our lives. They will inspire us and encourage us to be better, to do better, and to achieve the unachievable. We love our professors… just not all of them equally.

Because every English major must have a blog...

It's 8:30pm on a Tuesday night and I am doing anything I can to avoid my homework. Sometimes I binge watch Friends on Netflix. Sometimes I hopelessly and pathetically play my boyfriend's Xbox by stabbing at random buttons and making my characters do endless summersaults. Sometimes I even pull up applications to places I would never actually enjoy working but that simply sound good at that moment (the Buckle, for instance). Anything I can do to get out of studying for French quizzes, grading 100-level English papers, and reading Condorcet, I WILL DO.

I am your typical upper level undergraduate student.

By now, I have already been through the loopy freshman phase where hanging out with friends at Steak'n'Shake until 2 in the morning is cool and grinding your bank account down to $10 is normal. I have no desire to go back there. That was a solid year of annoyingly loud dorm room conversations, turning in assignments late because my GPA didn't matter yet, and saving up piles and piles of dirty laundry in my room to take home to mom on the weekends. Nor do I have any desire to go back to my sophomore year when I finally realized that screwing around with my grades my first year was a bad idea, figuring out that I actually need to eat something other than pizza and ramen, and flirting with boys in my department was a very bad idea. Even the first semester of my junior year seemed to merit little as I struggled to pull my GPA up, play a sport, work, and see my boyfriend in my free time.

I am now a second semester junior. And man, does it feel like I have been here forever.

The reality is that I am a transfer student. I have only been here 2 years this semester. I have had emotional break downs about everything you can think of. For example, will I even have a job after I graduate? Popular myth likes to tell me no, but HALLELUJAH, I am an English major! Now, I know what you must be thinking. We're all a bunch of Austen and Hemingway nerds who sniff book pages in our spare time, and you might be right. BUT we're a bunch of Austen and Hemingway nerds who can write! True, most of our writing comes in the form of term essays and discreet blog posts about philosophy and book reviews. Hey, it's a start though.

So, where does this leave me?

It's 8:30 on a Tuesday night and I am doing anything I can to avoid doing my homework, including starting a blog. Those who can, write. And those who can't, hire.