College is overrated. Is it too late to get a refund on this semester’s bill? I don’t know. I haven’t asked yet. “College” has always been a word with positive connotations, but all it has meant so far is compromise.

What happened when you got to college? You realized it was exactly like high school, except there is less class and you have fewer friends. I said you, not me. I’m very popular. You realized one of the best things about college (no, not the food. You go to hell, Sodexho) is that the only way your parents can yell at you is over the phone. College is, for many of us, a very long and extended sleepover camp. What happened to finding ourselves?

It seems a lot easier to find a drink than it is to find out who we are or what we want to do.

What we want to do is not usually something that is taught in a class. More often than not, what we choose to do in life is less of a choice and more of a compromise. We are not choosing something we want to do, we are choosing something we feel like we have to do.

How many accounting majors list accounting as a hobby? What these people have done is made a choice, which is what all of us who are unsure of what we are going to do post-college have yet to do; they understand that college is a means to an end. All accounting can do for them is provide for them a steady salary which should be enough to pay for rent, pizza and wings. Many of us understand that, but it’s still difficult to sweep our dreams and aspirations under the rug of reality.

Where can you go besides college? John D. Rockefeller already took the oil baron route. Bill Gates already took the drop-out-of-college-and-start-a-software-company idea years before I thought of the same exact thing as a zygote. It seems like because of the innovators, pioneers and entrepreneurs of the past, there is less room for ingenuity today. These are people who essentially opened doors and then closed them firmly behind them because of the dominance of their strategy. There is less space with which we can separate ourselves from the pack.

College is just one of the final stages into filtering us into society’s neatly pegged slots and openings. Where does the creativity, innovation and human spirit come in? You can’t just do whatever makes you happy because you might end up voiceless in a world where money is the only language.

I absolutely hate schoolwork. It is one thing to learn something that is interesting, meaningful and practical, but another thing to learn something for the sake of fulfilling a GenEd and to give off the impression that I am educationally well-rounded.

We have no choice but to go to college, assuming living on the subway and wearing a jacket made of newspaper and duct tape is not something we want to do. If it makes you feel better, we are all in this together. Every sacrifice is a means to an end. Make sure that end is to be happy and that it comes sooner rather than later.

Save up some money and then one day, cash out. Disconnect from society. Join that nudist colony you’ve had your eye on. I’ll see you there. We’ll play some volleyball.