Here we are at the end of the year, and while there is a wealth of topics to consider for my last column, I feel I must be rather old-fashioned today and criticize our culture’s current obsession with “social media.” And I’m okay with being old-fashioned on this particular issue. Because as college students, we are nothing if not social.
Yes, it’s that time of the year again: college tour season. You know it’s spring in Chapel Hill when it is impossible to walk from one side of the quad to the other without encountering a semi-circle of high school students and their parents, all listening with varying degrees of interest to a current Carolina student shouting enthusiastically about first-year seminars and the like.
In our current economic crisis, college students are more concerned than ever about their degrees’ value in a competitive job market. It takes a sort of stubbornness these days to decide to be an English, history or romance languages major, as students in these fields are forced ad nauseam to answer the elusive question “What will you do with that?”
In my last column, I expressed my general frustration with UNC’s course requirement system, that cruel plague threatening to overthrow our education in favor of mindless, rote box-checking.Building off this theme, I would like to address specifically the lifetime fitness requirement, a particularly onerous component of our curriculum.
When I first decided to come to UNC, I was excited about the beautiful quads, the friendly atmosphere and the chance to learn from some of the nation’s best professors. What I wasn’t expecting was to have to jump through a series of daunting hoops in hopes of one day graduating.
