Why I want to be a professional student

Why am I uttering such a preposterous thing mere days after finishing the semester where I spent four months bitching about papers, exams and the crappiness of school in general? There is method to my madness believe it or not.

Though many students complain of stress, and rightfully so, the life of a student is really not that bad. Yes we all feel the pressure of exams and papers and the lack of time to finish everything but what’s the worst that could happen if we missed a deadline or two? A drop in GPA, having to retake a class, none of this adds up to the end of the world. Compare this to the world of careers and work where missing deadlines has real and lasting consequences. Take my part time job for example where tight deadlines are a regular occurrence. If we miss one a show doesn’t open or we have to reschedule everything. With some deadlines we also risk losing funding. This has helped make me put school deadlines into perspective. In other jobs missing too many deadlines could mean losing your job.

What it amounts to is that there is a certain safety inherent in being a student. It becomes a handy excuse at time. Oh, I live with my parents because I’m a student. I don’t have a job because I’m a student. It’s a handy way of shrugging off things that are largely socially unacceptable for the rest of the population. We also get to enjoy a feeling of superiority when we reach the point where we think we know everything in theory, or at least a lot. Come on, we’ve all been guilty about throwing around words like commodity fetishism and conspicuous consumption just because we can. This only works in academia because the reality is, once you land that first job it’s not going to matter how much theory you’ve managed to stuff into your brain or that you’ve read Bourdieu’s Distinction in its original French (one of my geekier goals lol) because you will soon realize that you actually know nothing about the job you’re supposedly qualified for. I’ve had friends who upon landing that first job lived in fear for the first six months that they would be uncovered by a fraud and sent back to the fast food chain.

The life of a professional student would be a handy alternative to both the stress of school and the stress of work. How so? Well if you were a professional student, that is somehow able to take all the classes you want without ever having to finish, it really wouldn’t matter if you got that paper done or finished that exam. You could take classes in basket weaving and finger painting if you so desired and never worry about meeting silly graduation requirements (ahem CMNS 261 and KIN 110) and so long as your gpa kept you out of academic probation it wouldn’t really matter if it were a 2.0 or a 4.0 because you’d never need to use it to get that job or get into grad school. On the other hand, you wouldn’t need to face getting a real job either and when people asked you when you were graduating you’d shrug your shoulders and say “never, who wants to graduate?”

Now if I could just turn this into a financially viable option I’d be all set.