Has anyone ever been screwed over by the system?

College Life
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<p>Has anyone ever been screwd over by bureaucracy or any other factors outside of their control, such as luck or geography?</p>

<p>For example, going to a premier engineering school and deciding to leave but with a terrible GPA that won’t be accepted by any colleges other than a community college? Or another example would be having a very large and impersonal high school with very poor teaching quality, feeling like the grade system is largely decided by obedience and submission (the suck-ups) thus not having any motivation to do anything and basically just wasting 4 years there.</p>

<p>Has anyone else been screwed over by the “system”? And if so, how do you deal with it? When it comes to as big a thing as college, how would you react to having all of your past efforts seeming wasted and your future in jeopardy? Would you be bitter about it or would you get over it quickly and make the best of it?</p>

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<p>Not yet, thankfully. But I feel like a low GPA is not a screwed over kind of thing.</p>

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<p>Why not? If your GPA is ruined, you can’t transfer to decent school, and if it’s below a certain point, you can’t even transfer to many four year colleges.</p>

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<p>Well, I have always felt in control of my GPA since I work for it… It is kind of in your control.</p>

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<p>I have been a couple times, yes. For one, my high school had no APs, which for sure hurt my college admission chances (I was waitlisted at 5 top-20 schools but ended up at UW-Madison).</p>

<p>The main one in college has to do with APs also. Coming in with no credits sucks. I register last in my class every semester because of this and never get the classes I want. I get stuck with crappy teachers just because I’m happy just to get INTO any class.</p>

<p>/bitter rant</p>

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<p>Ah, not if you are dealing with an incompetent bureaucracy and if the professors teach it so poorly they can’t even understand the material themselves. or if the grade is curved so sharply as to guarantee that half the class will get below a C. Or lastly if you picked the wrong major or have to get past a certain boring class. </p>

<p>There is so much red tape and bureaucracy in colleges these days I am surprised not many people complain about it. I feel like it totally f*ked me over now I am depressed.</p>

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<p>I could see what you mean, especially with sub-par professors.</p>

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<p>I think the engineering grading system is especially brutal. What do they expect all the engineering dropouts with terrible GPAs to go do? I mean, I worked hard to get into that particular school but now my future is as a McDonald’s Manager? I don’t know what to do now. And yet all the slackers from my old high school have made good grades in their community colleges and transferred to other good universities</p>

<p>ok no more ranting sorry.</p>

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<p>Sounds like you ****ed up and ate looking for an excuse…</p>

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<p>Ah, well OK then I guess everyone here believes in the system and believes it is fair for everyone sorry for bringing it up.</p>

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<p>Yes, its called my High School. Thanks to them and the teachers, they have almost crushed my dreams and motivation lol</p>

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<p>Hmm high school sucked. Tiny hippie school that focused on “character” instead of useful information, i.e., college prep. If you hung out with teachers and went to the beach, movies with them etc, you got As. If you had your own life and didn’t want to suck up you made Ds. Ugh.</p>

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<p>What you’re describing isn’t being screwed over by the system, because it’s within your control. Poor teaching can be counteracted by self-studying. Choosing the “wrong” major is nobody’s fault but your own, and your GPA is within your control. Not having the motivation to study and thus deciding to “waste” four years of your life in high school without really doing anything is also your fault. Don’t forget that we all have to jump through the same hoops. We’ve all had to deal with teachers who assigned grades based on favoritism, and we’ve all had to deal with tough curves before.</p>

<p>Getting screwed over by the bureaucracy is being placed in a class well below your level and having to suffer through this all through high school, because your school doesn’t offer anything beyond Algebra II (which you have to retake despite having taken it in Jr. High because your school apparently doesn’t accept the credit). Because of all this, when you apply to most tech colleges, you’re rejected simply based on your lack of math creds and wind up attending an art college because it’s the only one that’ll take you with your credentials. You then drop out of because you aren’t learning anything and don’t want to waste any more money on a degree you care nothing for, especially since it won’t get you any closer to anything you want to do. You then enter the work force and stay there for a number of years, trying to figure out what the hell you’re going to do with your life, and eventually you discover that what you really want to do is to become a researcher for NASA - that is your absolute dream job - but you know there’s almost no way to make it there because of that school system you were placed in fifteen years ago when you attended high school.</p>

<p>This happened to a friend of mine, and that is what is called “being screwed over by the system.” She is one of the most intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and all of this was entirely out of her control. She had the bad luck to have been placed in a school system that would not allow her to learn at her own pace. She had the bad luck of attending a high school with an unsympathetic administration. She had ADD, so the administration assumed she was mentally deficient and placed her in classes below her level, and no matter how much she argued or how well she did, nobody took her seriously. Nobody helped her; her parents certainly didn’t. This high school pretty much screwed up her life for the next fifteen years.</p>

<p>All that said, she’s currently making the best of the situation. Has a decent job that she sometimes enjoys. Is thinking about attending CC again to try to dig herself out of this pit. And really, that’s all you can do. You can be as bitter as you like, but the key thing is that you also have to do something about it. There’s no point in being so bitter that all you do is wallow in self-pity.</p>

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<p>+1 to neltharion.</p>

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<p>I like “neltharion” example, its very similar to my situation"
I feel like i have been screwed by system/stuck in the system, in elementary i was making straight A’s graduated top of my class (were im at we graduate elementary,& middle) recieved all the awards etc, then i got to middle school had all advance classes did good, then i got to highschool i just had a major decline my grades were awful, I feel like i was put in a weak environment with weak individuals, throughout highschool i had nothing but push over teachers and im sitting in these classrooms like *** is really going on, teachers can even control the classes, it just destroyed my learning ability and it showed in my focus and grades, i feel like it has something to do with the black community, which after highschool i really dont associate with blacks anymore (im black btw) i dont live in the projects or from it but my school was a black school and i live on the black side of the county so its like the weak side with the weak public schools, my school had district zones with the projects so it had kids from the projects attending my school which made the school worst then what it was like having lots of fights and b.s, everybody thought they were hood even though the school is in the country.And the students at my school were all a bunch of losers in my eyes the more i look back on it and think about it, nobody was really talking about college till 12th grade and i know some that didnt, mostly everybody applied to b.s schools in my eyes such as VSU,NFU,VUU (black colleges smh) or the local state school (vcu & odu), i dont find any of these schools attractive or good especially an hbcu since going to school with blacks i already know what type of person applies to them schools and basically the reason behind it is just to go to school… My school barely had announcements in the morning and evenings so i never knew what was really going on at school or about extracurricular activities, they didnt even push us about applying to colleges until our senior year they didnt even push college to be honest (atleast i never noticed it) im on this site like daily and people talking about taking SAT’s during junior year when they didnt even push us till senior year im sitting here like WOW what was i doing in HS? what did i actually learn? why was i at such a disadvantage? why does my school continue to create losers in society? There was also times at my school where we would have lack of “paper” like were on some type of budget and they cant print more paper, so us students had to use notebook paper? i mean seriously the schools on the western side of my county i highly doubt they went threw such b.s, (the western side of my county is like the rich Caucasian side, beautiful schools, smarter kids from wealthier backgrounds, big homes, with 1 new HS which is public & nationally recognized in our state, and this is all in the same county as my school i graduated from just a different side, 35 miles apart from each other) it just shows when you study these demographics that anything “black” is awful and your put at unfair advantages to other races, anyways i wasnt told about my GPA till beginning of my senior year (last minute) my counselor seemed racist/think less of me but i think less of her lol, she wasnt willing to work with me neither was i after recommending me a HBCU which made me hot, i remember Algebra II class like it was yesterday ahh another pushover teacher, we didnt learn anything and random kids would just walk in the class and try to spit game at the teacher, skip class and chill in her class while she teaches us, then we had this thing called SOL where we take a test at the end of the year for that class (in my state we do it starting at preK-12th) mostly everybody in my class failed it i did too ,but passed it the second time after i had a tutor who made it so easy cause my math teacher definitely wasnt teaching me anything lol.
To make another comparison i have 2 cousins who came from another county & school, there school was new and it is another top public school in the state 97% caucasion, like 3% black, one of them went on to vcu the other didnt, but the one who didnt he isnt smarter then me im positive (not to sound cocky im just saying) he graduated with i think 3.7 if im not mistaken, i went to his graduation to see him and his school graduate and man was i suprised they made an annoucement that everybody graduated with 3.7 and up and like 70% of them graduated with above a 4.0 my cousin wasnt part of that 70$ but im saying if you was to put me in that environment i swear i would of came out on top, There graduation was even much nicer then mines and it was in the same Arena, theres wasnt as hood like mines either with a bunch of parents yellin for the kids like animals
To sum it up i feel like i was setup to be like the rest of them i graduated with a awful gpa (2 something) and i still finished top 50% out of 421 other kids, i dont do drugs/smoke weed, drink, like the rest of them, i dont live in the projects but i got little thugs in my neighborhood (there not going to be nothing) studying my neigborhood nobody goes to college straight out of hs unless its some black college or community college (more cc) i had to go to cc cause of my HS, this my first semester here i should end up with a 4.0 this semester then i got 1 more to go before i apply to transfer cause im not gettin no assicates hopefully i get accepted OOS to these good schools, After all this i will never recccommend living in the black community, going to public schools unless there all caucasion in a upper class area, my kids will be going private when i get older to avoid the b.s</p>

<p>**might be spelling errors cause i didnt look over it fully</p>

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<p>^^^
Someone needs a reality check…</p>

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<p>I’m ranked 4 instead of 1 because I took orchestra… But then I got over myself when I realized that music was more important than a worthless number.</p>