Gamer Girls

Every Sunday, I’m going to talk about why I left the US, the process of moving, and my adventures in the UK. Sort of a biography ala James Rolfe, but for free, and in serialised form, and not written by Newt Wallen.

I’ll start with graduate school because this was the pivotal event. Had I not gone to this graduate school, I never would have left the US.

I wasn’t a good student in college. I got B’s and C’s and only managed to graduate by finding the easiest classes with the professors who pass everybody. I’d never studied for a test in my life. I don’t even know how. I also rarely did the assigned work. I just showed up every day and was able to bullshit my way through the tests. Fortunately, there were a lot of essay tests.

I remember one such test, it was on a book, and I didn’t even read the book. Not one page. I didn’t even buy the book. It was a book about smoking called Smoked: Why Joe Camel is Still Smiling.

So the test was some weird bullshit with just one question: “Why is Joe Camel still smiling?” Basically, summarise the book.

I didn’t fucking read it. So I just wrote a bunch of facts about smoking. And it was a politics class and the professor was a communist so I framed it in this sort of fashion. The tobacco industry is making billions of dollars. They have a history of exploiting farmers. They’ve successfully lobbied not to increase tax on cigarettes because they know that higher prices on cigarettes is the main reason why people stop smoking. Shit like this.

The tests get graded and the professor actually read my test answer to the class as an example of a good answer. The shit that I was saying probably wasn’t even in the book. But it didn’t matter. I was able to fake my way through it and I got an “A” on the test.

Graduation is getting close. I start panicking because I don’t know what to do with this useless degree. So I ask a fellow student what he plans on doing after graduation. “I’m going to be a rock star.” Well, okay. He wants to give an asshole answer. But I guess he just didn’t know what to do either.

I didn’t want to work. And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what sort of jobs I should look for. I had no idea. I had a couple of part-time jobs during college and it wasn’t anything remotely prestigious.

So I said, “Fuck it. I’ll go to graduate school.”

I applied to ten or fifteen schools. All bottom-ranked places, because that’s the only sort of place that I could get into. Aside from my poor grades, my standardised test score was also really low.

I was accepted into two schools. One was the absolute bottom ranked school in the country and the other was…less than bottom ranked. But how much less, I didn’t know. It was a fairly new program at this school.

So I decided to go to the place that wasn’t the absolute bottom-ranked school in the country.

It was a long way from where I lived, but whatever. It’s fine. See a different part of the country. I got an apartment fairly near to the school and it was fine.

I also took out student loans. $50,000 for the year. But this is normal. This is what everybody does.

I had no concept of what it meant to owe $50,000. I went to a public, in-state university as an undergraduate and the tuition was reasonable. Nowhere near $50,000. I had no idea how long it would take to be able to repay this much money. I didn’t know what the monthly bills would be. It’s just, I’m going to school, it costs $50,000/year, here’s the money. I didn’t need a co-signer or anything. I didn’t have any previous credit experience. Nobody cared. They just gave you the $50,000.

This was also 20 years ago. The internet wasn’t what it is today. The information wasn’t out there.

So I get to the school, I’m looking at some of my fellow students, and I’m thinking, “Some of these people aren’t very bright. How did they get in here?” Then I’m thinking, “I’m not very bright. How did I get in here? They seem to take anyone.”

We get assigned to read a lot of shit but I don’t read any of it because this is what I did in college. But on these tests, you can’t just fake your way through it. You have to actually know what was written in the books. So I didn’t do well.

As the year went on, more and more people were leaving. There was a big drop after the first semester, when the grades came out.

The school had a harsh grading curve. The average grade in the class had to be a C- or something. And in order to continue to the next year, you needed a C average. So statistically, a large number of the students couldn’t continue to the next year.

This was all by design. It was a scam. They admitted students who had no business being in graduate school. Who had no prospect of completing the programme. And they had this grading curve that made it statistically impossible for large numbers of students to continue on to the second year.

This was all set up to get as many $50,000 tuition fees from as many people as possible. And this was all guaranteed loan money.

So I didn’t finish the first year. My grades weren’t good enough.

It was embarrassing. I moved all this way. I had to tell my family what happened. Now I’m right back where I was, with not knowing what to do in terms of employment, but now I also owe $50,000. This was a complete waste of a year and I have this massive debt now with nothing to show for it. And the school was a fucking scam.

But I had to do something. I had rent and bills to pay in addition to this massive student loan debt. So I started looking for work.