Unnecessary Complications: People Who Should Not Be Pursuing an Advanced Degree

Later on tonight I’ll be giving a presentation in this class that I’m taking for free at the local college where I teach. And while it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to be saddled with a measly five minute presentation when I already have my advanced degree, such is the way of graduate school and I accept that part of the deal. Hey, it’s a free class and it puts me closer to a free graduate certificate so fine, whatever, I’ll do the presentation.

And tonight, giving the presentation won’t even annoy me. In fact, I like giving presentations because once I start presenting an issue I turn into one of these people that like to hear themselves talk. That’s the perfect quality for a presenter to have and I have that quality! What I will be annoyed at tonight, though, is this one moron girl who is enrolled in the same class as me. This girl (and I say “girl” because she is in no way mature enough to be termed a “woman”) is completely unprepared for graduate school work. I’ve been sitting on this entry for a while, but now I intend to share with you why this girl drives me absolutely crazy (and not in a hot, sexy way, either).

First, let me set the scene. As of Fall 2009, I enrolled in a graduate program at the local college where I teach. However, I first enrolled in this program way back in Fall 2003. I left the program after a single semester for a variety of reasons – one of which was that some of my classmates were incredibly unprepared for graduate level work and the thought of sharing the same degree with them made me sick.

Case in point: There was a girl in one of my classes back in Fall 2003 who was a complete freak show. I’m not sure what her disability was, but she cried at the drop of a dime. If you looked at her, she cried. If she raised her hand to answer a question and you called on her, she cried. If she raised her hand and someone else was called to answer the question, she cried. And it wasn’t a gentle weeping. No. This was an angry, frustrated, hateful type of crying – like she was hungry for your soul or some shit.

It was fucking scary.

One time I was assigned to the same group as this weirdo and I’m pretty much the nicest guy on the planet when it comes to working in groups (even though I, like every other graduate or undergraduate student, hate working in groups). The group had to divide up specific parts of the project to complete the work. Fine. Easy enough. Everyone knew that the crier was going to be a problem so we asked her what she wanted to do first. The tears started welling up and a look of incredulous rage came over this girl’s face. One of the women in the group became extra nice and sincere and helpful and told her that it was okay and that she could do whatever she wanted for the group if she just told us. Well… You would have thought that this other girl told the crier that she was a filthy cunt because the look on the crier’s face was the look you’d see on the face of a woman who just had her cat fall into a shredder. Her rage was palpable.

And that was her attitude in every class. She would have been better off enrolled in Michael Meyer’s School of Mass Murder.

Needless to say, I saw that a person like this was accepted into the graduate program and I told myself that I didn’t want to be associated with freaks like that in the job market. Thus, I went to Rutgers, earned my Masters Degree, and moved on.

But now I’m in this program again (because it’s free). I’m taking one class each semester and believe it or not, my class this semester takes place in the same room where I had class with the crier. Go figure.

I’ve surveyed my current classmates and they seem to be of a much higher quality than the group from back in Fall 2003, which is good to see. However, there is an idiot moron girl in this class who makes my fucking skin curl every time she speaks. Why, you ask? Imagine you’re in a graduate level class and you have an idiot who prefaces almost every comment with the word “like.” That’s what this girl does. Further, imagine that each sentence is trailed with either “you know” or “and stuff like that.” That’s what this idiot does. A typical sentence may sound like this:

“Like, what type of theory of communication should we research and stuff like that?”

What the fuck does that even mean?! And better yet – how is this asshole in a graduate program for communication!? Wait! I have the answer to that question because this bimbo told us why she’s there!

During the first class icebreaker/introductions (another waste of time), this dummy said that she’s in the class because her parents selected the program for her and are paying for her to go to graduate school. She went on to say that she didn’t want to go to graduate school, but her parents told her that they were going to pay for her to get an advanced degree to help her out in the job market, and stuff like that. The poor professor was baffled and didn’t know what to say; as a fellow professor sitting in the back of the room, I was shocked at what this girl was revealing to the class.

Frankly, everyone must have been surprised. One of her classmates asked her why she enrolled in a Masters Degree program when she didn’t want to do it, but the professor cut off Idiot Girl before she could respond. Folks, I gotta tell ya – this is the type of person that I would never, EVER hire! And if I was in charge of admissions at the local college, I would have never allowed this woman to get her dummy self in the door to begin with. This girl will be a black mark on the program that she’s in for years to come – mark my words.

It gets worse. So I have to give this presentation tonight. The assigned length of the presentation is 5 minutes. Fine – who can’t do a 5 minute presentation, right? THIS GIRL CAN’T DO A FIVE MINUTE PRESENTATION! In fact, when she gave her presentation a few weeks ago it lasted almost half an hour. As a professor, I appreciate when students go above and beyond, but this girl should have failed the assignment on time management alone. But wait…it still gets worse. Not only did this derelict go on for an additional 23 minutes beyond the time limit, she copied and pasted her entire research paper into the PowerPoint and those 23 minutes consisted of her reading the presentation word for word!

After the first 30 seconds of this bullshit my mind was blaring with: Unacceptable! Unacceptable! Failure! Failure!

If I was the professor of this class, I would have cut the student off at the ten minute mark and failed her immediately. And if she wanted more time, I would have publicly embarrassed her by saying that we can all read and we don’t need her to read her paper to us since it’s up on the PowerPoint screen (albeit it in fine print because she had WAY too much text on each slide).

Sooooo…

As you’re hanging out doing what you do tonight, know that at around 7:00pm EST tonight I’ll be ready to punch the wall in the classroom where I’m listening to an idiot prattle on in a program that she doesn’t want to be in and performing at a level that is unacceptable for even undergraduate work.