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Comment Re:Monitoring Blogs (Score 1) 248

Yup, monitoring blogposts is going to be TOTALLY useful. I can already see the blog posts that they'll have to be reading through:

"Dear Allah,
It's me, Muhammad. How do you deal with peer pressure? I mean, like, my friends have been pressuring me to join the jihad against the infidels. They've all joined the jihad, except for me. I really want to, but my mom won't let me. She's so uncool! What should I do?"

or

"Today I tried to talk to this hot chick in my engineering class, but she totally ignored me. Well, fuck that bitch - in a few days I'm going to be partying it up with 72 fine-ass virgins! YEAH! And that bitch will burn in hell with the rest of the infidels."

or

"Ugh! Service with homemadebombs.com is HORRIBLE! I ordered 300 pounds of ammonium nitrate, and it took them FOREVER to ship. When they did, they only shipped me half my order! I'm still waiting for my bulk shrapnel to come in. I'm never going to do business with these guys again."

Comment Great, an alternative to tattoos! (Score 5, Interesting) 105

It's gonna be a whopping 15 seconds before the body modification types get their hands on this, and start using it to implant horns, bumps, random appendages, what-have-you wherever they please :P

Anyone ever see the story about the guy who implanted horns on himself? http://www.ambient.ca/bodmod/implants.html

This seems like a much better alternative than silicone or teflon or whatever they're using these days. I could go for

Comment A cautionary tale - been there, done that. (Score 2, Interesting) 564

Totally agree with above post. Here's a little cautionary tale for you, from a girl who was pushed into a science major:

I scored above the 99th percentile on my SAT, ACT, as well as the ASVAB (one of the qualifying tests to join the military.) In fact, I just about maxed out the scores on the ASVAB - my recruiter wanted to photocopy and frame my scores in the recruiting office. I usually scored higher on the verbal sections than math sections on all of the above tests, but I was still in the top few percentiles. Given all that, I thought I was hot shit.

In high school, I had only had slightly-better-than-average grades because I didn't enjoy doing homework, but I generally did very well on my exams. I took a lot of AP and honors courses in both math/science subjects as well as the liberal arts, and breezed through them. Then when it came to college, I got a full scholarship to a state school. I matriculated as a biochemistry major because 1.) I've always done really well in those related subjects and 2.) my father is a biochemist, and he pushed me to follow in his footsteps. It was not my top-choice college, but I went there because it had good reputation and the scholarship was quite persuasive as well.

Long story short, I flunked out of college. Miserably. It only took me a semester before I was put on probation, a year to before I lost my scholarship, and then another year before they put me on academic suspension for not making the minimum grades. I hated my major, I hated my courses, and I hated everyone at my school. I didn't even bother attending my classes most of the time. I could rarely be bothered to even leave my room.

Anyway, I was too afraid to tell my parents that I flunked out of college... so I didn't. Instead, I told them I was doing fine, and became a stripper to pay for an apartment away from home and to attend community college while I figured myself out. Before I became a stripper, I also considered the possibility of running away to another country and suicide - being an academic failure is THAT big of a deal in my family, and I was THAT upset about it. I actually managed to pull this off for a while, until I couldn't take pressure of living a double life anymore.

I eventually 'fessed up to my parents. I pulled up my grades enough to transfer to another school. Unfortunately, I'm still a biology major for practical reasons - despite me failing so miserably at my last institution, I managed to pass enough courses in my major that my fastest route to graduation is to continue in my major. I am under a lot of parental pressure to graduate as soon as possible - for them, it's a great source of shame and embarrassment amongst our family and friends to have a daughter who didn't graduate college in 4 years.

Honestly, if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't have even gone to college at all until I was sure of what I wanted to do. I didn't discover my love and talent for physics until just last semester, when I aced my physics course. (Until then, I had always done rather poorly in physics - another reason why I chose biology/chemistry.) If time and money weren't issues, I'd probably pursue a degree in either engineering or physics instead of biochemistry. It's amazing what motivation can do - despite my past track record of laziness, I'm actually doing quite well now. My current school is a lot more academically rigorous than my last one - if I had put in a quarter of the effort that I am putting in now, I probably would've graduated a year early and with honors, no joke.

I'm not going to lie - being a stripper was probably one of the best and most formative experiences of my until-then overly sheltered life. I learned a lot about myself, about other people, and about the way the world works. It was a better education than I could've gotten at school. It also changed me to WANT to become a better person and to WANT to use my (other) talents to do useful, constructive things. Without all that, even if I had managed to pull up my grades to go back to school to please my parents, I probably would've fallen back into a cycle of avoiding class and failure all over again.

Moral of the story is, let her do what she likes - for herself, and not to please you or anyone else.

Comment Re:Mod parent informative MUST READ for parents (Score 1) 564

I took a job at at car dealership last summer, and one of my managers had asked me my opinion about his 15 year old daughter going to college. I told him my story, albeit slightly more abbreviated, and started crying when I got to the whole part about parental shame. I was mortified about crying in front of my manager...

The next day, he thanked me. He sat down with his daughter and really discussed her goals and aspirations, and he realized that he had been putting the same kind of pressure on her that my parents put on me. Now he knew first hand how destructive that kind of pressure can be.

I don't have any regrets, but I still hate that I'm a disappointment to my parents. This whole self-improvement thing is still a work in progress.

One idea I've seen come up on Slashdot pretty often is the idea that college isn't for everyone - rather, it should be for people who WANT to be there. The fact that there are so many people in college who are only there because, well, that's what you're "supposed to do after you graduate from high school" really does hurt the quality of the education.

It is absolutely ridiculous that I never attended any of my science classes more than maybe 3 times a semester, and passed them with a C. (It was the electives with the mandatory attendance that killed my GPA.) I understand that there's a curve, but the curve should be NO WHERE near that high. I'm pretty bright, but I'm not that smart. Looking back, I didn't learn a damn thing there.

At my current institution, I'm competing with a group of very motivated students who WANT to be in school. Yes, it's a lot more work, and yes, I have to put in a lot more effort just to make average grades - but I am learning a lot.

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