I've never gone to college before, and it's kind of an alien realm to me...

I've never gone to college before, and it's kind of an alien realm to me. What exactly do you do when studying classics and studying philosophy? What do you write about?

Is it worth going purely for the purpose of expanding your knowledge?

normal student
>take humanities class
>wake up with 20 minutes to class, it's a 10 minute walk
>get there 4 minutes late without showering
>look at slides on laptop
>note what the slide says because you're a fucking retard instead of listening to the actual meaning/content/explanation by the professor
>occasionally lapse and check facebook or some other retard site
>at the end of the class your notes look like a scattered copy of the powerpoint, with a few out of place quotes from the professor because you have no deeper appreciation of the subject or material so when he stresses something all you can do is quote it in bold and put question marks next to it
>skip several classes based on whether petty socialising overrides them
>"party" like a white bread piece of shit at hipster get-togethers where people with man buns discuss east coast rap
>do some/most/none of the readings depending on your constitution (either way, comprehend nothing due to lack of enthusiasm)
>go to final exam
>cram beforehand from barely readable notes, just trying to glean soundbites and gists
>take exam
>north american grade inflation gives you something in the B range
>say "like, i know, right? oh my god im so happy i got a B, haha i did NOOOOOO studying haha this class was too harrrrdddddddddd"
>go to starbucks
>graduate with a B~ average, maybe A- if you're a keener
>paradoxically, talk enthusiastically about how you're a little junior professional/intellectual
>jerk off for a year on daddy's money
>wait until daddy gives you a daddysmoney job
>rule over wageslaves until dead
>OPTIONAL: go to grad school
>be just as worthless in grad school
>focus in on tiny narrow purview with no passion but pretend it's your all-consuming passion
>continually post on facebook shit like #JUSTPHILOSOPHYTHINGS #JUSTCLASSICSTHINGS HAHA #WHENTHELATININTHEMOVIEISWRONG LMAO LOLLLLL WHERE MY CLASSICS BUDS ATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT WE'RE GETTING DRINKS AT [OVERPRICEDBAR] DADDY'S MONEY IS PAYING
>clog academia by treating it like a sinecure

0.00000000000001% minority of passionate students
>go to class
>surrounded by these well-dressed nothings 24/7
>can't befriend them because they're all rich vacuous niggers
>develop drinking problem
>try to remember why you love scholarship through a nonstop 10-year winter of being surrounded by overfed white noise
>possibly behead classmates

normal student writes a paper
>UMMMM HOW MANY SOURCES DO WE HAVE TO USE :S WHAT'S THE MINIMUM FOR A B, LOL??

normal student discusses student life
>omggggg i can't go anywhere without my coffee lol XD i'm DYING i took too many courses and my family is only giving me one vacation in europe this semester :/ *buys $16 designer cheetos with daddy's credit card*

>be shit at socializing
>think you understand everything better than everyone else
>spend too much time looking around and passing express, petty judgment on others (I'm an observer XD) and autistically worry about how you appear to them despite the fact that they don't give a shit
>be insufferable to be around because of your superiority complex
ftfy

damn.. you took it.. and you FLIPEPD it AROUND. THE TRUE SUBVERSION.. UNEXPECTED!!

enjoy your public policy job you worthless cunt. tell your dad i said "hello" and then i will kill him.

I just want to know if I would be able to write out psychoanalytic interpretation and analysis of the Western canon

>psychoanalytic interpretation and analysis of the Western canon

Not OP but I don't understand the point of going to college for philosophy. Can't you basically read all the great philosophical works yourself? It seems like with libraries and the internet, you can basically teach it to yourself. What will going to a college really do?

This is very accurate for state schools and most private schools
Small, expensive liberal arts schools are slightly less unbearable
Community College would be 10x more numbing

Now that everyone "needs" a degree, most students don't give a shit about learning anything and want to coast until they can get a job, drink beer, sit on their couch, watch sports and shop for overpriced designer garbage

The quality of the average student has declined precipitously.

College is basically highschool: II now that it's so common, the kids are still as aloof, "bored" and unwilling to learn anything.

The only time this isn't true is in STEM courses where everyone is too austistic or busy to socialize, where the students (in the harder majors, EE, CS, Math, Pys) have to be passionate with the major to do well and with the (Serious) aspiring medical/law/vet/dental school dorks who are generally balanced, interesting people

You're going to write papers about beginner level overviews of western philosophers and compare and contrast them using 5 cited sources and at least 3 quotes (any more/less and points are deducted), to be turned in tuesday before 9PM

You will do NOTHING challenging or of value, it's all busy work and streamlining things so that the sleepless and debt crushed grad student TA can grade 100 in a weekend
Gradschool is a circle jerk that'll indulge those tendencies of yours

College is a waste of your time, the liberal arts are a joke at the undergraduate level now

T. B.S. Finance Graduate

>BS Finance
Please tell me you went to Penn or else all of your opinions are invalid because you went to a shit tier school.

Meaningful discussions and interactions with other like minded people and possibly contributing to academic work

Penn is hyped as shit

So I assume such ideas are looked down upon in school?

on a serious level what will happen when you go to university if you are one of the very, very, very few who actually have what it takes to be a good scholar is that you will go through about 60 successive realisations that all of your current interests, ideas, and pet projects were naive compared to the reality of the field you want to go into.

it takes several years of immersion to get a good feel for what has been done before, what is cliche, what is a "realistic" project, so that you can plug your own interests into this general feel and see which ones are naive

if you're a total amateur, and you're sitting on some spunky idea you think is original, it's probably going to be raped by the reality that it was already done 50 times in the 1930s and then again in the 1970s. even your interest in psychoanalysis altogether might die, when you realise it isn't what you thought it is, or you learn more about its mundane/sordid practice and history, or you learn how niche it is to study compared to other things in your country.

a lot of people who went to university with some vague dream of being the next nietzsche ended up getting funneled unconsiously into some shit they hate, because it's more "realistic" as a major for job prospects, but don't even realise they hate it. or they just realise the whole thing was stupid to begin with, and nothing is what they thought it would be. lack of enthusiasm will make you do the bare minimum to get good grades, and you'll just ghost through years of busywork. especially these days, when most classes just are paper mills and grade inflation is everywhere, the system specialises in protecting you from the harsh reality that you aren't actually fucking learning anything, and thereby wasting years of your life.

but that's just part of developing your initially naive interest into something real. if you really want to be an academic, you can do it, sort of, if you don't care at all about being rich or spending your youth youthfully, and you know you're talented.

if you just want to have an enjoyable four years and then enter the job market competitively, consider doing an economically viable major and minoring/auditing in the classes that interest you.

Academic philosophy is too large for anyone to study on their own.
The amounts of books cover more than 2000 years, and a large amount of papers are being published every year about every possible subject.
If you have to LEARN philosophy, not only read some philosophical books, a guide is a must. A (good) professor will make an equilibrium between the lectures and assigned reading, which includes mostly chapters or fragments - studying whole ancient/medieval books would take considerable more time than a few years.
A degree in philosophy is supposed to give you the basics of philosophical thought since ancient greek philosophy to contemporary philosophy in 4 years. A person could certainly teach himself philosophy, but it would take more time, and it would be 'out' of philosophical discussions, which means that it is more likely to deceive oneself into understanding something that they don't really understand, or deceiving themselves into the truth of an idea they just had. It is more productive to study with people than alone, and even if you have a group, it's more productive to study with experienced people than random people, which is what we find in college.

Also, college is free where I live. I'm not sure if I would study philosophy if I had to pay a shitload of money for college in america

As a STEMfag, I get lectured mostly by insane, old white guys or unintelligible shitskins. My classes get a ton of homework and cover a lot of concepts, but we only learn about half of it, and proceed to pass by curving C's to A's.

this is true too

the benefit is college is hard to describe because i think college is an awful pile of garbage

the collegiality sucks, the teaching sucks, the classes are pathetic and afraid of rigour, everything sucks, the whole thing is just a giant daycare centre for the rich

but somehow being there made me actually read all the books i needed to read to "actually know philosophy." granted, it didn't do the same for the 30,000 other people i graduated with, who are all mental retards with pieces of paper that lie about their familiarity with various subjects

>Go to tiny private liberal arts college on a billion grants and two jobs
>Everybody's pretty passionate about their little niches
>Zero apathy to be found
>Lots of asian girls go there
>None of them want to fuck you, but one left her flip flops in your car once

I had a motors course for my EE major
The professor brought in this old baseball sized electric motor and went on to proclaim:
>This is a motor
>It is very small
>IN FACT
>This is THE smallest motor in the world

Also, test question:
What two things have the lowest coefficient of friction, with a blank

The answer Waxed wood on dry snow

The teaching for every stem class I've had since high school has been like that. These fuckers don't get to half the material that's on the test.

>>None of them want to fuck you, but one left her flip flops in your car once

did you lick them?

i sometimes put my wang in girls who go to private liberal arts colleges, and all of their facebook/fetlife friends from said colleges are like crazy green-haired pan-demiromantic sex-friendly aces who go to "munches" and play pokemon go. soon, i will gas them.

>did you lick them?
Nah mate, I just returned them.

Surprisingly, none of the people here are very weird. There are a few very fat tumblr types, but they can't walk fast enough to annoy anybody.

I don't have any illusions about the ideas I want to write about never having been explored in the past, I only want to build upon what came before me.

What exactly are the projects that people work on in this field?

as a recently graduated STEMfag this is pretty much correct. I still have no idea how I managed to pass some of the classes I did

I only really want to study very specific knowledge in a very specific context honestly.

>try to remember why you love scholarship through a nonstop 10-year winter of being surrounded by overfed white noise

This is going into my forthcoming collection, "Literary Greentexts & Selected Shitposts".

The purpose of the classics/philosophy is cultivating a contemptus mundi and detachment from mundane accidents. You should learn to cast aside the bitter ideas and grope after the toothsome.

A good grounding in Classics teaches you that we have done all this before, and there is nothing new under the sun. The entire history of the world, and all of the best of philosophy, numerology, astrology and alchemy is covered by Homer (in the original, of course).

Where can I pre-order

kek, I'm getting a degree in networking, I just don't possess the misguided misanthropy typical of neckbeards

>where people with man buns discuss east coast rap
kek, nice one