So I've recently gone back to school to for social service work with intention of working in a youth shelter and I've really started to resent having to take an elective.
Basically the elective I'm in has no relation to the other stuff I'm taking and is fully asynchronous, so no class or lectures only readings and assignments. For me that's almost impossible because I have ADHD and some pretty serious executive dysfunction. It doesn't help that the elective has a way bigger workload.
Just wanna know if I'm not alone in feeling like this.
Some of the electives I took ended up being the most interesting experiences of my education. Maybe you took a lousy course, because a lot of courses are intended as broad introductions to the basics of the field, rather than preparing you for cutting-edge research (or more likely, current industry trends).
It may be that your program is just a bad fit for that style of learning, but I'm really thankful that I had the opportunity to learn directly from top-tier experts, and to spend time with people outside of my program whom I would never have met otherwise.
It seems like this is two issues. One is the elective itself, and one is the way the coursework is delivered. I also have ADHD, and I hate asynchronous, unstructured learning. Absolute dogshit way to "teach" a course.
That said, learning about things outside your immediate focus is important. The reason STEMlords are the way they are is because they think that everything outside of STEM is essentially recreational. It's not the STEM that's the problem, it's the lack of context for anything else, and the attitude that they know what they should and shouldn't be learning despite not having learned very much.
I'm not saying you should grind out a shitty course just because you happen to already be enrolled, but I'd treat the issue of your current elective as the problem to solve, rather than creating a negative association with broadening your education in general. You're going to want to learn about other stuff, but if you're having a bad time with this elective because of the way the course is delivered, see if you can find a different course, or a different way to approach this one.
Yeah, honestly the more I think about it the more I think the problem is the delivery of the course. If I had a class to go to I don't think I'd mind that much.
I wish I could have taken more electives and less "required" classes, some "required" classes had nothing to do with my major and pissed me off.
Also college should be free.
I loved my electives, but I was also a traditional student, so I wasn't as focused on just getting out with my diploma as quickly as possible the way that non traditional students typically are. Since you say you went back to school, I'm guessing you're older, with an older person's responsibilities that a 19 year old college student typically doesn't have. That might be part of why you're having a different experience.
I hate that we have to pay for them. Loved the classes though.
Especially loved when the instructors knew that 99% of their students where there because of mandatory electives and made the class chill as could be.
Totally understand having a "serious" mandatory elective messing up your ability to focus on the real classes though.
I think the opposite, honestly. If I'm going to go for a degree in something like history, communications, or politics, literally none of these fields will ever need me to take a calculus course or a computer programming course. Why the fuck should my ability to graduate have been dependent on my ability to be a code monkey?
fuck I hated maths courses but I was also determined to graduate with a BS rather than a BA because it's funnier, so I suffered
I have a bachelor's in library science, which is actually just a bachelor's in needing a master's degree to do anything with it.
Love my Bullshit in Anthropology, I've used it so much I don't think I could even find my diploma if my life depended on it.
Very often electives were annoying, but also they made me learn about shit like Judo and gave me a reason to take mythology and Chinese, which I loved and are important parts of my character now.
Oh, online or asynchronous classes fucking suck for me too though.
Seconding what other people said about asynchronous classes. Had a few too many of those in my major and ended up switching fields because of it.
I loved my electives but that's mostly because I enjoy the humanities as much as I did my major at the time.
TBH, it sounds like the biggest problem there is that its an asynchronous class. I can kinda understand why these exist, but I hate them and I don't really learn in them either. I have no interest in classes that aren't in person.
But basically I think university needs to have more electives and more gen eds. The idea that college should be about a narrow education that qualifies you for one particular career is basically a neoliberal plot to destroy the university. People gotta learn about history and art and all sorts of other shit.
It does really suck with how are system is set up, where college is expensive as shit and basically a lot of people are there just to get the degree so they can get a job so they can get money, and we all need money. I get that. But I think universities should try to hold out as long as they can.
If i didn't take my elective programming class in my final semester of college, I'd be a completely different person than I am today, making way way less money too lol. I kinda hated them in general too, but you never know until you take it.
