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.

Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou!

okay, I'm done gloating...not!

Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou!

Justice hath been served today by the football gods, as our might blue-clad warriors defeated the black scourge of the earth orginating from the god-fosaken place known as Columbia.

and oh-yeah, the goal post no longer reside within the stadium. And it's all because of the Karma we aerospace engineers created yesterday. The word of yesterday was "Mother F'er" literally, we even censored it. But we specifically set aside today word, a full 24 hours early. Today's word of the day my friends, is goalpost.

and just for good measure....

Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou! Muck Fizzou!

Don't remember because lots of people died
Don't remember because their families have it tough.
Don't remember because any loss that it caused anybody.

Remember because if only for a day you knew the face of evil. You understood what length the enemy was willing to go to in order to see you suffer. Remember that from that day forth ignorance vanished. Everyone in the world knew your foe. Everyone in the world saw that you were in a fight for your very existence. In the shadow of smoke you can easily see your friend from your enemy. Anyone who then opposed your quest for existence didn't do so out of their superior values for human life. They opposed your quest because they oppose your rights, and they oppose you.

No longer should our right to existence be subject to the whims of our enemies. Civilizations rise and fall, people are mortal, ideas are forever. No matter who you are, regardless of your beliefs, you will be judged. Whether by your deity or the children of history, a consciousness not your own will determine the morality of your actions. The principles that govern your actions will be questioned, do you have them or do your actions decide your principles. Emotions will die; logic lives forever.

All things and people will come to an end. Stand and face your enemy, those without swords can still die on them. What's yours is yours, including your life. If the end comes, go down fighting for what is rightfully yours. History will remember you as we remember the Alamo. Evil is there, whether you acknowledge it or not. And only in the face of danger will the true colors of character be revealed for all to see.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist.

a toliet is not an example of rotational flow Bradley, nor is it an acceptable answer to any question ever asked by any professor. But thanks for giving us today's catch phrase.

I got some props over at the RANT for pointing out the Chief's Defense's lack of sucktatude on Sunday. Also, I'm sitting pretty in a tie for 3rd place in the Official Sport of TOG, MDFP. How about a resounding Hazay! for your fearless leader?

....somebody?....anybody?...Bueller?....Bueller?

yeah, that was the catch phrase of the day.

In other news, I've decided to go home this weekend for the first time since Independence Day weekend, and only the 2nd time since March. This will most likely put me grossly behind on my 550 reports but I don't really care right now.

Also, as you will note, this is my 13th consecutive post unrelated to politics or ideological thought. This will not stand for long, I feel a mega-rant beginning to brew deep within my cockle...or may below the cockle, in the sub-cockle region.

So I have an "homework" assignment for my Flight Dynamics class that's due every Tuesday morning at 8:00. I put quotation marks around homework becuase it's not homework like you think of homework. Conventional homework may take you one or two nights to get done, working 2-3 hours a night.

Nay my friends, that is not my homework. If I could only be so lucky. My "homework" is a weekly engineering report on a collection of concepts that will be covered the next week (as in, we have to learn it before we are taught it) and the complete histories of at least 5 obscure airplanes that you have never even heard of (Fokker/VFW 614 anyone?) My "homework" takes at least 15 hours to complete every week, and this is a 3 hour class.

Now you'll understand my joy when I tell you that I am done with my report and it's not even Monday yet.

Since I'm spending upwards of 60 hours/week in the engineering building, I'm finding it harder and harder to stay sane. So in an effort to stave off the impending doom and gloom I face, the 7 of us 4-year Aerospace Students have invented the catch phrase of the day. Oh, what an invention it has been.

You use it just like an explective, but you don't have to worry about professors hearing you and commenting on your lack of professionalism. If you're really really tired and somebody asks you about some homework problem, just give them the catch phrase and you free. Can't stand the silence of note taking? just subtley whisper the catch phrase and all is well. I don't know how long this magically ability will hold, but it's pretty fun so far.

recent catch phrases
Wednesday- Folding!
Thursday- Deridgable *w/ english accent*
Today- Window

The following is an actual copy of the notes I took in my Aerodynamics class today:

"Conservation of Mass; founding principle of Newtonian mechanics
Dear lord I'm freaking hungry. Somebody tell Farokhi to stop having a boring monotonous tone. Must stay awake must stay awake. Where doest that junk in your eyes when you wake up come from? Maybe its tears that have been whipped to a rich lather by the nightly REM dream sleep. I'm so tired right now whatever possessed me to write in stream of consciousness anyway? oh yeah, it's because I need to stay awake I'm really tired still.

At some point in my childhood I heard about a gang somewhere that requires its new members to hid beneath the cars of innocent people and when they come to get in, the gang member cuts the innocent person's Achilles tendon, which basically prevents you from walking for like a year. Who ever told me that? And who would tell something like that to a child? I hope that never happens to me."

Casual conversation amongst friends in permissable, provided your friends are sitting 4 rows (and a good 20 feet) away. Despite the deprived image you have in your head, people actually do work here.

The same goes for class-oriented discussions. 4 different classes use the lab, and at any given time people from more than one of them are in there. If you need to hold a 10 minute discussion with somebody about why their data is valid, stand your lazy carcass up and walk over to them, don't subject the rest of us to your ineptitude.

Basically I'm just saying; don't raise your voice...ever...if there's no fire, I don't care.

All that being stated, don't this the wrong way when I say:

"Dammit Bradley! Shut the hell up right now or I will sing you a lullaby with a splitered two by four! You got it, you overbearing spoiled bastard child of a Quaker and a drunken Scottish soccer hooligan?"