Let’s get demoralizin’!

Posted by E-George on October 16, 2007

I’ve been inducted into an obscure club by the Engineering Student Services at UNM.  It’s a club reserved for a special class of students: Those whom the School of Engineering isn’t sure are smart enough to succeed.  They sent me a letter which, in the politest of terms, required me to solicit and collect mid term grades from each of my professors - no exceptions - and send the completed form back to the Engineering SS for evaluation.  On the mid-semester grade sheet it has a form letter that starts off with, “We are concerned about this student’s performance,” and ends with “Thank you.”   I’m passing most of my classes.  In fact, just today, I got an 80% on my second-semester circuits test (Smoke THAT Engineering SS!).  Not bad when I left that test 2 weeks ago ready to fling myself under the tires of the Rapid Ride.

I know what’s going on here.  I may not be the soundest example of academic viability, but I’m not the last one off the turnip truck, either.  The Engineering SS is actually determining if they will, first, put me on academic probation, and second, encourage me to leave their elitist midst and pursue the basket-weaving happy lands of the College of Anything-That’s-Not-The-School-of-Engineering.   Well, they seriously underestimated me.  I am the barnacle on their educational boat, and there is NO scraping me off now.   Sure, I may be failing physics in a spectacular way that lends itself to some sort of flaming car-wreck analogy, but, it’s just like learning to ride a bike.  You try and try, and just because you peddled into a head-on collision with a barbed-wire fence and now you’re laying snagged in a pile of cow shit, you can celebrate! Because you peddled there on your own!  Physics is the same way.  If I have to drop the class, I’ll just try again.  And again. And again.  Until the day when I don’t crash into an electrified barbed-wired surrounded by a sticky cow-pie moat, but instead correctly veer my bicycle such that I can keep peddling into the sunset of graduation.

My circuits professor told the anecdote while he signed my “You may be too stupid for our liking” form that his freshman year in college he had to do the same thing and his grades were such that the associate Dean called him in and asked if he might prefer to transfer to the College of Arts & Sciences.  My professor responded, “Hell, no!” and has since gotten his PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University.    That story certainly took the edge off of being educationally profiled.

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