This is not the typical college experience

This is my last editorial for the Technique. We call it a “swan song,” owing to the fact that swans have been known, in rare circumstances, to sing when they write their final editorial for their college newspaper. Beautiful creatures, swans. Lovely plumage.

I am writing this swan song from deep within the bowels of the College of Computing, a building and an institution which has, in many ways, been like a second home to me these past four years.

Granted, the home in question uses its children as slave labor, regularly pushes them beyond all reasonable physical and mental limits and tends to develop kind of a B.O. sort of smell as the semester progresses (I imagine there’s some sort of intensive, perhaps industrial in nature, cleaning regimen that goes on during extended breaks to prevent the ungodly stank from becoming overriding), but a home nonetheless.

You see, in a collegiate world, where a degree is regularly thought of as being something which is bought rather than earned and a mandatory minimum number of As to be distributed by professors is fast becoming the norm, I—all of us, as a matter of fact—have been baptized by fire. We have been forged in the flames of an Institute that cares little for coddling and a great deal for making the best damned engineers (or computer scientists) we can possibly be.

If there is anyone out there who is still undecided about whether or not they want to come to Tech in the fall and just happen to pick up this particular issue of the Technique, allow me to enlighten you as to the true nature of our beloved Institute. Tech does not provide what one would call the “typical college experience.” There will be little time for the antics that one typically associates with college life. I could probably count the number of parties I’ve been to on my hands...in binary.*

Tech is the sort of place that one attends if one honestly and truly loves one’s chosen field, because that field will be what you do on an almost tear-inducing number of Friday nights. So, you’d better be able to run on the fuel it provides you when you do well in it. Otherwise, it will be a very long four/five/six years.

One could make a great many arguments about the overall worth of Tech’s approach to its students’ well-being. Views on the subject range from Tech being interpreted as a batch of sadistic harpies, bent on the suffering of every last student that they can get their awful, hell-forged claws upon to something of a “tough love” style father figure. He hurts you, but only because he loves you, baby.

I’ve found that the more time I spend here, the more Stockholm Syndrome sets in and the more I begin to sympathize with my abusers (read: the Institute). I have become convinced that I am stronger for my suffering and that no man can hurt me because, dammit, I survived the Georgia Institute of Technology, and that counts for something.

At least, that’s what I tell myself. However, as the hours tick by, and I’m still no closer to figuring out how the hell to write an O(1) scheduler for the Linux kernel, I find myself increasingly of the following opinion: “Screw this hell hole. I’m graduating in May and I’m not looking back.”

*For those of you non-CS types out there, that joke was pretty funny. Not great, but it would have elicited a chuckle.