After what I'm going through right now, I'm starting to lose faith in the academic system. Not YOUR academic system, mine, as in KU Aerospace Engineering. Your system is crap, but I already knew that. For some reason however, I had always thought that this department, and as engineering in general, was somehow better.

Different? Yes. Better? No.

Your standard university education is useless, that's just a fact of life. Even as engineers we will only use 15% of what we learn in class during our life times. The difference comes in difficulty. Aerospace Engineering is still hour for hour, the hardest field of study out there. Make no mistake; I'm not saying that med school, Bio-Chem, or the other pedestals of intellectual dogmas are easy. I'm just staying that Aerospace is harder. There is no more hour-intensive academic program out there.

There in lies the problem. If you wish to graduate with in 4 years, your junior year is comprised of 18 hours each semester. And those are engineering hours, where you go to class for 4 hours per week for a 3 hour class. So it's equivalent to 20-24 of your liberal arts class hours.

Then you throw in professors whose sole purpose it to make it through class doing the smallest amount of effort possible, and still have a nicely shaped grade bell curve. So they really don't care if you learn or not. And class-hour limitations mean nothing to them. "20-hour long reports due every week for a 3 hour class? Not enough, let's throw in a test with out applying the brakes” And the material is more difficult than you can possibly imagine.

But still, since all the grades are curved, as long as you do well respective to the others in you class you'll come out fine. Therein lies the next problem. Aerospace attracts the most ambitious, hardest working, most anal-retentive, detail-oriented people there are. So they will sleep 3 hours a night for weeks on end just to make sure that everything they turn in is perfect.

Stuck in this giant mess is me, and the others like me. We have always been more intelligent than most people. But we have neither the obsession nor the flexibility of will to play suck-up to the academia establishment. We won’t play politics with the teacher just to get a grade, so the system is stacked against us. Even more specifically it's stacked against my middle class brethren. There is an entire layer of us who aren't poor enough to be "needy" and whose parents can't pay all our bills.

So I'm stuck in the crack, I have to work my way through college. In a normal line of study this is just an inconvenience, but in aerospace it's a death sentence. Our department averages a less than 10% 4-year graduation rate, so by the junior year, only the most ambitious of the best remain. Meaning the curves slide higher, and my grades fall lower. There are about 80 hours of school work that each AE junior needs to do each week, and that's just to achieve acceptable levels of work, C-level basically. Now add in my 20 hours of work each week, and I'm doing 14 hours of work each day, 7 days a week for 16 straight weeks.

Hotshot lawyers work 80 hours a week, and get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. ER doctors can work 80 hours a week and they get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I work almost 100 hours a week, pay ten thousand dollars a year to have professors mark the hell out of my tests with their red sharpies, blissfully handing me back 52% tests. Ten thousand dollars a year to give them countless assignments that took me countless hours to finish because they don't care enough perform any semblance of teaching while in class, then they pass those test off to some grad student to mark up at will. Then they slyly pass me by in the hallway and smile like I enjoy being in their company. I pay ten thousand dollars a year to be subjected to an attitude of disgust and contempt while I listen to their snide remarks as they look me in the eye and tell me that I really should spend more time working on my math skills, that I should spend some extra time with a tutor, that I should put in more time and thought into my work if I ever want to become successful.

pardon the language, but I just can't contain it anymore:

Fuck You! I don't need you preaching to me from the pulpit about dedication and pride in your work. There are plenty of things that I do wrong in my life, but don't you even consider adding lack of commitment or unwillingness to work. I put up with too much shit it my life to have you irreverently suggest that I'm just lazy. I have not met a single person in my 20 years of life that has done more work in any week of their lives than I do every week. Call me stupid, I don't care, but don't you ever call me lazy. It's an insult to me and everything I've gone through and I work too damn hard to let you get away with that idea.

I've had a real bad week. Now I'm not a violent man, but if you keep pushing, I'm liable to jack you in the face, and after the shit you tried to pull over on me, you deserve it.

I don’t want pity, sympathy, or respect just because I have a lot of work to do; I just want you to realize, like I now do, that the deck is severely stacked against me.