Collegiate Times

It's overcast, drizzily and cold down the concrete corridors of the drillfield. You're stuck on repeat, locked into a schedule that breaks before it bends. Your brain inhales tranquility between two cans as music filters out existence. People move in slow motion and consciousness blurs between automatic and somatic. It's Monday.

Such is the life of a Tech student. We've all been there. But things don't have to be this way … there is an answer. The potable cure for pseudo academia, pompous professors and lifeless perpetuation is of course, absence all together. Skipping.

People thrive on routine. It gives structure and meaning to lives otherwise directionless. I guess I'm a little like your typical guy. I hate asking for directions.

Skipping classes, especially those you can afford to miss, allow us an infinite number of equally if not more useless activities including sleep, cyber space catatonia, or perhaps a trip to one of the fine coffee establishments downtown. Hell, I've even skipped class to study for another class. If that's not somehow admirable, I don't know what is.

Laziness doesn't have to be a crutch; it can in fact be a positive facilitator. Some of my finer compositions, both literary and musical have come out of times when I should have been doing something else. If a brilliant idea for a melody creeps into my head, I can't just whip out my guitar and go to work in class can I? It takes a lot of will power to rearrange my priorities so they're out of place enough for me to be comfortable. Maya Angelou would tend agree, the caged bird cannot sing.

Take relationships for instance. If you're out on a Thursday night and you happen to hit it off with someone amazing, so amazing in fact that you wind up making a morning out of it, should class be a factor Friday? Of course not! Relationships help us understand ourselves in ways we cannot. They serve as interpersonal mirrors through which we see deeper into the facets of our own character to grow and maybe one day love. Well there's no way I'd give up the opportunity for an hour of pandering when I'd rather be panting.

Remember high school, when skipping was more a function of survival than convenience? The veritable time warp of public education knows no mercy and the only way to break out was to get out. Some might argue that the flexibility of higher education makes skipping obsolete, a byproduct of personal laziness. I disagree. With the sheer volume of work we face on a daily basis, the pressure to perform in increasingly professional arenas and competition so fierce it drives some students to suicide, attendance becomes trivial. Sanity is important, after all.

For some, skipping simply means maximizing academic achievement. You trudge into class convinced that you're being good and making the most out of your parents' hard-earned money, when it hits you. You don't have to be there. Regurgitating information from PowerPoints available online with no enthusiasm hardly suffices to warrant my attention. Professors frequently resort to painstaking tedium, processes by which they're generally comfortable 'conveying' information. Am I the only one insulted by this? After 13 years of pushing through the public education system, worrying over SAT scores, and taking enough AP classes to give Marilyn Von Savant an aneurism, what do I get in return? Spoon-fed, read to and utterly disengaged.

How many times have you heard someone say, "I love school, but I hate the school part of it?" College provides us the opportunity to grow intellectually, socially and perhaps spiritually. Success depends on the motivation we as individuals put into work outside of class. Strenuous studying and hard work turn us all into the over-caffeinated, under-rested heroes we were born to be. Never sacrifice an opportunity to grow because of restrictions founded in fear. Ferris Bueller said it best: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."