WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT ESPRIT IN 2023

It’s the return of the season. This is my first article in 2023. I hope everyone is safe and happy. This time it’s not going to be an untitled story. This article will be about something I thought about carefully when it was too late.

I have this good friend who interrupts me every text I start with “I had this idea”. The last time he did it wasn’t about this matter in particular, but we talked a lot about this dilemma. Therefore, I thought about breaking down some thoughts for anyone who might be curious about what it is like to study at ESPRIT.

As many of you know, I started attending this university last year. It has been almost 6 months now. I believe that’s a long enough period to experience the process of a full semester. It wasn’t that fun. School is never fun when there’s money on the line, big money, to me at least. I never had that constraint. I never cared this much about school. I don’t know if money is one of the factors that push students to study more or work harder.

I didn’t attend classes for the first 2 months, I had an IT helpdesk job not so far from here. It paid some bills. I afforded a couple of beers on the weekends. No school pressure. Life was good. I was half a student, half a cool worker until midterms came along. I had to make a choice. It was a very hard one even tho the right choice was clear from the very first start. Do I quit my job or do I drop out and get refunded for my money?
I don’t know why I felt like it was a life-or-death matter back then. I was 21 years old back then feeling like 30 as if it was the most critical choice in my professional career “being just another HPE technical support employee”.

I think you guessed it right. I resigned from my position. The most interesting reaction was my boss’s. He was like “why? what happened? did someone hurt you? did you get a better chance? how can I help you?” I wonder if all bosses act as if they care when you simply lay your resignation letter on the table with that much confidence. Anyways, HPE was fun while it lasted. I made sure I had fun as much as I can.

A week after my resignation midterms started. Fuck evaluation and fuck every form of it. It’s just really boring. It’s such a vague concept. I had a lot of questions going through my mind after I passed the midterms.
-Do you evaluate students for how much they can memorize?
-Do you evaluate students for the way they think? for the added value they can offer?
-can every form of evaluation be applied to all subjects?
-How can we make sure that we are using the right form of evaluation on the right subject?

I started studying for the tests, no try-hard or anything. Apparently, that doesn’t pay the bill and eventually, I fucked most of them up. Even the ones I didn’t fuck up got ruined by what they call “Note CC” around here. Everyone is crazy about it. In certain subjects, It can be worth half the mark. Imagine that you can guarantee yourself 50% of the mark just by attending classes, participating, and “being nice to the teacher”. Even tho this shit made a fat difference between me and several classmates. I believe that the whole point of attending class is to make teachers feel better about themselves. Information is already cheap. It feels like you’re only paying for the environment. The quality company, the academic help, the opportunities, and most importantly the certificate.

The degree now is a glitch that everyone is trying to exploit. Studying here turned into a race that the university keeps on adding new contestants to every new year. You are no longer guaranteed to get an internship or a job but you’re competing to get it. You are playing your odds. You’re just a number to the system. The same way you always were. It gets sadder every step of the way. Though the guidelines of race seem to be fair, education was never built over equality. As I always say: “Education is a classist war”.

Spoiled brats are all over the place. People who are abusing bugs in the system like buying homework, School projects, educational help, and even exams. It’s a mess. If you’re someone like me, and you’re attending a state university you must be feeling like you’re forced to learn things that you are not interested in. In my case, I Paid to be forced to learn things that I'm not interested in hoping one day it would pay off. You have to calculate the return on the investment plan that you’re willing to execute before getting enrolled here. Because once you pay the first half of the tuition fees, it will already feel like you have a lot to lose. You know that the only time men are afraid is when they have something to lose.

As the second semester began, I started to feel more comfortable with the flow. It’s more fun because there are more projects and more teamwork especially after I settled with a group of friends in class. It’s very crucial around here since teamwork is mandatory often.

Enough about my personal experience. Let’s talk about the way they teach around here. You have 5 school days including a day. You study 2 subjects per day, 3 hours each. You get Wednesday and Friday afternoons off. You have what I call mini-subjects. These mini-subjects combined form an educational unit. they usually last 7 weeks including an exam at week 7. You pass from 8–9 finals at the end of each semester. You also have coding projects that last the whole second semester. That’s pretty much it.

What keeps people interested in this school are the “success stories” that you can hear everyone talking about. Someone’s son who pursued his studies at ESPRIT got a work contract abroad and now he’s filthy rich. These fairytales keep on getting thousands of new students every year and millions of dollar bills to Mr green’s account. You know his name is Mr green for a reason.

There are several questions that people ask me frequently like Are you comfortable? Are you having fun? do you like the flow? I want to answer once and for all. No, to all of the above. I don’t like being here and I never will. I’m just adapting, that’s what human beings are all about, adapting. That’s why I’m here in the very first place. I’m adapting to my financial situation. I couldn’t guarantee myself a way out of this country so I’m just enhancing my chances to find one. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t have quit my job knowing that I don’t have a steady source of income on the side. At a certain point, you can’t learn anything if you’re not affording yourself. I figured that wanting the big bags isn’t really about spending them. It’s about making them. It’s about the ability to provide for yourself and your loved ones. I think what I hate the most about being here is the fact that I’m back to being a consumer. That I’m downgrading horribly. It sucks to be a passive consumer at home. The more you grow up the more it gets harder to simply ask your parents for pocket money even tho they are willing to provide unconditionally. It just can’t make sense to me.

In the end, I think It’s not worth it anymore since a long time ago. It’s no longer a college, it’s an enterprise. It doesn’t matter who you are and where you’re coming from you’re just a number that should pay tuition fees before the deadline. I’ll see you next time.