The estimable professors of Purdue University have now had one full week to attempt to kill me, and every other student on the campus. However, we have all survived (I believe).
I suddenly realized that it would not be surprising if one of my fellow 40,000 college students had managed to kill themselves this week, so I checked. To the best of my knowledge, it appears that none did at Purdue.
However, one student did fall 25 feet to his death from a building at Florida University this week. I do not believe that suicide is suspected, but I might jump too if I attended a school called F U. I mean, most schools will screw you over by charging you both arms and both legs, but not many will come out in the open like that and tell you.
I would say that the possibility of someone dying is probably a couple of orders of magnitude higher right now (approaching midnight, the first Friday of the school year) then they ever are in the labs and shops on campus. This leads to an interesting point: If the University is so worried about safety, then why do they spend so much time on teaching us how to be safe in a lab (where no one has been hurt, or had fun in years) and so little time teaching all these dumb kids how to make responsible decisions about drinking, drugs, and sex (all far more likely to kill you than lab).
You may have noticed that this is my first post. Big woop. I’ve been contemplating the idea of having a sarcastic vent to help me get through college and since I am required to make blog posts for my Engl 108 (composition class) I thought now would be the perfect time. So, here it is.
Insincerely your cynical collegiate commentator,
Luke A. Mishler
P.S. I really hope my instructor doesn’t hate me for having to wade through all my other blog posts to find the class related ones. Oh well, I’ll try to identify them somehow.
I believe you are correct when you say no one committed suicide at Purdue yet this semester but I have an interesting story to tell you about that! This past summer at my apartment complex, Willowbrook West Apartments, some kid who was taking summer classes, I guess, had a mental breakdown and jumped off of his second floor balcony to the pavement below. I haven’t heard whether or not he survived but I saw it happen and saw him being wheeled away in an ambulance. All joking about the difficulty of classes aside, it does happen and when it does it is definitely tragic.
ReplyDeleteTo address your other point about a so-called “smart decision” class, I completely agree with you. If we are required to take these lab classes that spend the first two weeks telling us how to not chop off our fingers or what to do if we spill acid on ourselves, they should at least make all incoming freshmen take a class talking about the dangers of alcohol, drugs, and indiscriminate sex. Maybe they figure we retained all of that information from high school health class, but to be honest, most people probably just chose to ignore it.