Things I learnt at Mississippi State
Updated: Jul 11, 2022
May 9, 2019
What all I learned at Mississippi State University in 2 and a half years. I will skip my coursework because that is obvious.
You cannot pay people to help anyone unless they are getting paid directly by the party that needs help. Right from the first semester, I noticed that institutions meant to help me were only working for themselves. When I arrived in the USA, my academic adviser placed me in dumb classes, such as architecture appreciation. She made me a bullshit schedule. I went back and removed most of those classes and picked classes that I liked. She wondered if I was planning to graduate in 5 years. I did it in 2 and a half years. If I could go back, I would add the most difficult courses a freshman could take that can also satisfy core requirements. Looking back, I regret not asking teachers in those classes to structure an honor course for me so I could gather more honor credits.
Institutions that were created to promote culture and diversity were those destroying culture and diversity. Institutions like Holmes Cultural Diversity Center, Interfaith groups, and ethnic organizations bred racism and anti-social sentiments. If the premise of Indian Student Association is that only Indians can be my friends, understand me, and support me, it is a racist thought to start with. It is a bias for the in-group and against out-groups. In general, all institutions that are established on religion, ethnicity, and race are bound to promote discrimination. I refuse to buy any of that. I never participated in any such institutions.
As a new one in the USA, people who were supposed to help me like folks at the international institute, International Student Advisory Board, and my RAs were very inadequate at doing so. I needed help with getting a phone number, a bank account, etc. Those who made my life easy were everyday people like my roommate and a few friends I made.
How to get out of unnecessary dumb courses? No one gave me a solution. It was to test out of them, which I found myself (CLEP). Later, I found out that higher-level courses could substitute for lower-level courses, meaning calculus could satisfy my algebra requirement. In fact, the rules were much more flexible than people thought. My associate dean did not let me skip Statistics 1 no matter how much I begged him to let me save $110 (Pearson assignment code). In fact, I wanted to skip both Statistics I and II so I could take Marketing Research. Dr. Rogers had the ability to let me bypass at least Stats 1, but he did not cooperate. I ended up losing $110 and 3 hours in my schedule, which I would have loved to allocate towards a course like Biological Psychology. Just to add, I destroyed both Statistics I & II, but I lost the game. Later, he did let me use Cognitive Neuroscience to satisfy foreign language requirement. I already knew a foreign language, Hindi from an American perspective or English from an Indian perspective.
Anyway, I encourage you not to go to college. Take it from someone who finished 4 years of coursework in 2 and a half years while staying on the president's list every semester save the first. All degrees are worthless. Go the degree route if you want to live a life of dependency. Go your own way.