I'll be glad it's over... so glad I'm going to dance around when they hand me the damn diploma.

but yes. I am doing something. I've already taken English Comp 1 and I'm signing up for Comp 2 in a few days. So technically I'm already in college, but I get demoted during the day.

I loved the English Comps. They were so much better than English in high school (Or my high school teacher/classmates were just lame) and much more free range.

Taaaake advantage of it.. but don't forget to dance. You have to do both or it won't be complete.. and then when we're all 21 we'll booze it up. Not like that uh.. has anything to do with it, but.. belated celebrations?

Yes, the comp classes are awesome and you don't have to worry about your peers being I love it.

If I don't dance at graduation I will be sad.

No booze for me because it tastes bad.. I'll just point and laugh at all the drunk people and get good blackmail on everyone.

Hehe.. Sounds like me. Not really fond of the stuff (I remember asking a cousin for some beer when I was younger and I was like "Yuuuck!"), but if it has a fruity taste and someone slipped it to me I'd never know.

I think my 1st SGT cried at our graduation.. and he was a hard ass. He'd always tell us how he'd shove his nine inch up our butts the moment we screwed up.. and he didn't take any , but he was bawling his eyes out. It was scary.. but nice to know that someone cared.

And anyone who hasn't taken Comp classes (Well, you havta, but...) DO IT! So free ranged.. I'm thinking of signing up for another English class. Also was thinking about going into women's studies to cover a requirement, but that's another story...

I post too much. Maybe I ought to get ready for work.

It's never too late for ROTC or Military Service bonds, funding and scholarships. That's how I'm probably going to end up wading through college, even if I don't stcik with the whole military life plan.

Military = no no no no no for me.

::winks::

I actually seriously considered applying for the naval officer BDCP program, and got a good test score on the ASTB, but decided not to pursue it.

I was told for as long as I can remember that my parents weren't paying for it. So when I graduated I had no idea what to do so I just joined the Army and now I have a pretty good job for my age and still haven't finished college.

High school GPA's are silly. I was never in National Honors Society because I didn't have a 3.5, but I also took all honors and AP, where other people took all accelerated and maybe one honors and were in NHS. It's stupid, darnit! But then I have 23 college credits from AP tests, so that will save money from textbooks and crap.

But I'm getting something like 5,000 a year from a scholarship at my school, and my parents are paying for the rest, except I will probably take out some loans that I'll pay back myself after my first year. My parents just...always saved money for college, and they paid for four kids who all went out of state. Granted not to insanely expensive schools (University of Maryland/Delaware). Anything would have been out of state for me anyhow, because I moved out of pennsylvania in june so I wouldn't be in state for tuition for Penn State, and I got rejected from UNC .

You wanna know what's sad? Over the last month, I've retaught myself Calc 2 in two weeks (it's been 3 years), taught myself the basics of Calc 3 in one week (I wouldn't be ready to take the final, but the class should be a cinch), and now I'm working on Probablity and Statistics and Linear Algebra (the latter looks like a cinch to me - algebra is my best bit of math).

Nice work. In high school I was a math ace - even though I hated it. In college I completely flunked out of it. I guess I just partied to much. Now a year later I've bought Algebra, Trig and Calc for Dummies. They had a sale the 4 Dummies books a few months back, I couldn't resist.

Fincial aid progams based on "need" tend to have these sorts of stupidity. My wife had that problem. Her parents refused to chip in a penny for her college, but the government counted her parent's income when assessing her official government measurement of need. By the time her brother got to be college age, the parents had divorced and so he qualified for large quantities of money despite being in no different of a financial situation than his sister.

Though personally I think college is overrated. Unless you are going into something like law, medicine, or engineering, you probably do not really need a college degree. Though you *might* make more money with the degree, that is offset by all the money you blow on tuition, and if you are a talented person then I think in the long run your pay will rise faster to be at its proper level via merit-based pay raises. In fact part of the reason college is so expensive is that so many people get degrees that shouldn't have. (In other words, excessively high demand.) If everyone stopped going to college for general degrees like philosophy, English literature, general business, ethnic studies, etc. then tuition rates would plummet. You can teach yourself most of that without a teacher anyway if you have the personal self-motivation to do your own research, and it costs about $120,000 less to do it yourself. Caveat emptor - some employers buy into the false belief that a college degree means something, so you may hurt your chances of getting that First Job, though once you break through the "job experience" barrier then you're golden.

Yeah - profession I'm entering needs a degree . Everything I'm studying this next semester (Calc 3, Linear Algebra, Probability and Statistics), I'm perfectly capable of teaching myself (and have, for the most part, already), but unless I have that piece of paper, my knowledge is worthless.

I agree. Its funny how some people never really work in the field they majored in. Personally, I'm going for the stuff that interests me. I'm a real estate agent now, so I have that to fall back on if I can't do anything in Zoology.

Move to Australia. You can do what you like at 18 here.

You can do what you like in the US as well. It's just a matter about getting caught or not. *recalls tricking a bartender into giving me a free beer when I was 16 years old...*

Yes, well, here you can do it legally. And I did more than trick the bartender at 16, almost ended up being arrested for public underage drunkenness