Farsong Blog-o-Matic - State of the Education

I go to Eastern Washington University. I live at home, having moved back in with parents.

There's a reason for this: money.

See, I never aspired to go to Eastern, eve if it was a decent school. In fact, it was the exact last place I wanted to go after high school, because I knew that the people who didn't leave Spokane would never leave Spokane; people who stayed in Spokane didn't change -- for all good and for ill that implies.

So I left for two years.

Then I came back to Spokane. There were a number of reasons -- I didn't really know what direction I was heading, I wasn't doing so well in terms of grades, it was expensive and I felt I was burning money and incurring far too much debt (any debt is too much), and I needed to be home for my own sanity as my mom underwent treatments for cancer. Not that the two years at PLU were not valuable -- they were priceless, and I needed to be there for my years after high school -- but more and more I feel like I had outgrown it without knowing it. I would not have been able to cope well with a place like EWU right after high school.

It's been bittersweet, yes -- it was especially had over fall semester because I wasn't doing anything, and all my friends were on the other side of the state. But as much as I'd needed PLU after high school, so too did I need a break after PLU.

EWU is just where I go to school. I don't have a huge attachment to this place. However, it's more about efficency than anything else. It's good to live at home, but more than anything else, it's cheap. That helps when I don't have a job.

The same is true for EWU, too. It's a decent school, but that's not why I'm here. I'm here because it's cheap and convenient. As an added bonus, it has a very good, job-oriented computer science department -- probably one of the best departments in the university. It's also very different from the academia of my former Liberal Arts major, all efficient and actual application of knowledge. And it's just as fun as writing or finding symbolism within books.

And you know what? I'm actually really happy now. I'm motivated to work, I'm busy (though, unfortunately, I haven't had time to really look for a job), and I like what I'm doing. Moreover, I've begin to make new friends around town and have renewed a few old friendships, too. I know what I'm doing, I know where I'm going (for the somewhat-near future), and I'm pretty happy.

I'm also pretty exhausted. School is busy and keeps me on-point. But I like it here. It's big and busy. It's not "my campus" like PLU was, and it won't ever be like that, but it can in time become mine in its own way.
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