W

hen I walked out 
of 
my 
first 
class 

at 
the 
University 

of 
Michigan, 
the 
sky 
was 

dark and the streets I had 
familiarized myself with during 
the daytime were foreign. Out 
of 
stubbornness, 
I 
avoided 

looking at the maps on my 
phone and began to walk with 
a new classmate. I tried my 
hardest to look like I knew 
where I was going and keep it 
cool. As I anxiously searched 
for a landmark that would send 
me in the direction home, I 
realized this transition was 
going to be more difficult than 
I imagined. 

College is not easy, and 

transferring can heighten this 
feeling. Whenever I discuss 
college with my older friends 
and family, they tell me the 
best years of their life were in 
college. Since the beginning of 
my college experience, I have 
been confused by this statement. 
How are these going to be the 
best years of my life? How could 
this be true for everyone? Is 
there a secret that I have not 
been let in on?

Last winter, when I decided 

to transfer to the University, I 
felt excited about the promise of 
my future. On the other hand, 
I also felt this great sadness as I 
was leaving a community that 
I had spent time and energy 
developing. During my freshman 
year at Michigan State University, 
I found myself searching for 
people that challenged me, lived 
active lives and had similar 
interests, but I had not joined 
any student organizations or any 
social groups.

During my final semester 

there, I decided I was going to 
get involved, and joined multiple 
student organizations, got an 
internship and worked in a 
lab. Even with this new busy 
schedule and social life, there 
was still something missing, so 
I went to Ann Arbor for a fresh 
start. I wasn’t excited about 
transferring, but I ultimately had 
to find a way to make my college 
experience the best for me.

I had two weeks to find 

somewhere to live before I 
moved to Ann Arbor, and a 
friend suggested I check out 
the Inter-Cooperative Council 
at the University. In need of 
housing, an instant community 
and with little time, I signed up 
to live in a house of 23 strangers. 
After trial and error in my 
social life, I thought this could 
be a way to seek people and 
community that was both active 
and challenged me. Little did I 
know this might have been the 
most important decision of my 
current college experience. 

In my house, I finally felt like 

I had a community to come 
back to when I came home 
after a stressful day of classes. 
This didn’t happen overnight, 
but occurred slowly over the 
course of my first semester. 
I want to make it clear that 
this was probably the most 
emotionally draining semester I 
had experienced. There was no 
instant transformation. It took 
time, and I was impatient to be 
happy with my experience.

Experiencing 
depression 

your first semester at a new 
university is quite common, 
as I learned in my positive 
psychology course. According 
to Steven Brunwasser, research 
instructor 
at 
Vanderbilt 

University 
and 
former 

Psychology Ph.D. candidate at 
the University, transfer students 
living off-campus experienced 
more 
depressive 
symptoms 

than freshman and transfer 
students who live on-campus. 
The 
depressive 
symptoms 

that the transfer students off-
campus had reported also did 
not improve by the end of their 
first 
semester. 
Brunwasser 

concluded that this must be 
from their lack of on-campus 
support and resources. Transfer 
students 
living 
off-campus 

are not given opportunities to 
engage with campus student 
life and the social networks that 
develop from them.

When I reflect on this period, 

I would definitely say that there 
were moments when I felt lost, 

and I see these now as signs of 
depression. I took comfort in 
knowing I was not alone in my 
experience. As the semester 
came to an end, I entered 
the spring still battling these 
symptoms, but I had friends and 
a community that continued to 
reach out to me even after I left 
Ann Arbor for the summer.

As a transfer student who 

continues to live off-campus, 
I was able to grow my campus 
social network through my 
cooperative 
home 
and 
the 

community of co-opers who 
attend our University. These 
were the individuals supporting 
and helping me navigate my 
first semester. My housemates 
have connected me to most 
of my closest friends, student 
organizations and university 
resources. 
They 
challenge 

me to become an active and 
involved student here at the 
University of Michigan.

As 
my 
second 
semester 

begins 
to 
play 
out, 
I 

understand now how to make 
my 
experience 
happy 
and 

fulfilling. Whether it is filling 
my schedule with activities or 
student organization meetings, 
practicing self-care or spending 
quality time with my friends, I 
am taking control of my college 
experience. With the support 
of 
my 
community, 
co-op 

housemates and new friends, 
I feel comfort in the fact they 
will be there for me as I take 
control and create my college 
experience. And I think that 
must be the secret of making 
these years the best.

If 
you 
just 
transferred 

or know someone who just 
got here, I am here for you, 
and there are other transfer 
students who are experiencing 
this 
unique 
path 
at 
our 

University. My best advice is to 
find your community and get 
involved as quickly as possible, 
because their support makes 
our large University feel a little 
more like home.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Wednesday, September 27, 2017

REBECCA LERNER

Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

EMMA KINERY

Editor in Chief

ANNA POLUMBO-LEVY 

and REBECCA TARNOPOL 

Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 

All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

Carolyn Ayaub
Megan Burns

Samantha Goldstein

Caitlin Heenan
Jeremy Kaplan

Sarah Khan

Anurima Kumar

Max Lubell

Lucas Maiman

Alexis Megdanoff
Madeline Nowicki
Anna Polumbo-Levy 

Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury

Ali Safawi

Sarah Salman
Kevin Sweitzer

Rebecca Tarnopol

Stephanie Trierweiler

Ashley Zhang

L

ast year, I had what 
could be called a mid-
college-life 
crisis. 
I 

switched my major four times, 
sliced my schedule down to 
eight credits and decided self-
teaching was more valuable than 
going to class. I even considered 
dropping out of college.

While making a dramatic 

exit excited me at first, I 
decided to take a skeptic’s 
approach to college. I began 
to 
research 
alternatives. 
I 

found a vocal community of 
college dropouts — or, as some 
refer to themselves online, 
“opt-outs.” I read the rants 
of frustrated students that 
sounded just like mine at the 
time. Frustrated by required 
courses, irrelevant material 
and the slowness of academia, 
they pondered leaving for the 
fast-paced freedom of the real 
world. They loved the idea of 
learning, but wanted it on their 
own terms. 

A 
cocktail 
of 
crushing 

debt, competitive admission 
standards and a shift in skills 
needed for jobs in the new 
economy has led many critics 
to question the value of going 
to college. With the advent 
of online programs and the 
development 
of 
alternative 

credentialing, 
students 
now 

have greater choice in whether 
to attend a university or to go 
to an alternative institution. 
The Bureau of Labor Statistics 
reported in 2013 that of the 30 
jobs projected to grow at the 
fastest rate over the next decade 
in the United States, only five 
typically require a bachelor’s 
degree. To fill this gap, the 
alternative 
providers 
have 

swept in, promising students a 
new credential to secure these 
new jobs in less time with little 
damage to your wallet.

These 
educators 
have 
a 

dynamic set of unconventional, 
experiential 
learning 

techniques, usually promoting 
personalized instruction, and 
focus on teaching 21st-century 

skills like online marketing, 
coding and data analysis. Some 
lambast the traditional college 
education as deeply antithetical 
to learning. According to Dale 
Stephens, founder of UnCollege, 
“When you go out into the 
world, there’s no structure. … A 
job doesn’t give you a syllabus.”

I caught up with one such 

company, Praxis, when I began 
questioning college. Praxis is 
run almost entirely by college-
age opt-outs. Derek Magill, head 
of marketing for the startup, 
was a particularly enthusiastic 
ex-Wolverine, a Classics major 
who shunned Homer’s “Iliad” 
to train opt-outs like himself 
for jobs in the new economy. 
Magill’s 
frustration 
wasn’t 

sudden like mine — once head 
of the University of Michigan’s 
Young Americans for Liberty 
club, he sued the school for 
discrimination in funding of 
student groups before opting out.

While conventional wisdom 

holds 
that 
college 
molds 

you from a naive adolescent 
into a capable adult, Magill 
disagrees. He believes students 
party too much, make fake 
friendships and brag about 
being chronically behind on 
their studies. As he put it on 
Quora, instead of forging their 
way through their lives, “they 
actively sought opportunities 
to 
avoid 
class 
and 
patted 

themselves on the back for 
selecting the easiest classes.”

The 
research 
seems 
to 

back him up — his gripes have 
actually been quantified. In 
their 
book 
“Academically 

Adrift,” Richard Arum and 
Josipa Roksa found that 45 
percent 
of 
undergraduates 

at 24 institutions showed no 
significant 
improvement 
in 

a range of skills — including 
critical 
thinking, 
complex 

reasoning and writing — during 
their first two years at college. 
Derek wouldn’t be surprised; 
this 
was 
just 
evidence 
of 

students memorizing material 
to maximize their grade point 

averages 
instead 
of 
truly 

absorbing knowledge.

Yet 
many 
students 
are, 

rightly, 
bound 
to 
disagree 

with these sentiments. College 
is often regarded as a time 
of 
self-discovery, 
providing 

a space to test out a diverse 
array 
of 
interests 
with 
a 

safety net to fall back on. 
Unlike a job, where responses 
to failure are harsh, college 
lets students retake classes 
and lean on the support of 
similarly aged peers struggling 
with the same issues. This 
unique 
opportunity 
in 
a 

young person’s life should be 
cherished, not attacked as a 
naive false reality.

As disgruntled students tune 

in to opt-outs’ messages, more 
and more will drop out of the 
system. Until then, however, 
the opt-outs have an uphill 
battle to wage against one of 
the most ingrained societal 
expectations of young people.

Agree 
or 
disagree 
with 

the opt-outs’ conclusions on 
college, they do make valuable 
points about the changing 
nature of our economy. While 
students focus on attaining 
the 
best 
academic 
and 

extracurricular 
experience, 

they should dedicate equal 
time to independent projects 
that build their portfolios in 
whatever they want to do once 
they graduate. This could mean 
coding a new app with friends, 
publishing content online or 
interning at a startup.

In today’s economy, students 

must 
build 
experiences 

independent of their college in 
order to signal employability to 
others — degrees alone won’t 
get you a job like they did 
for our parents. This doesn’t 
mean get the cookie-cutter, 
coffee-fetching internship at 
an accounting firm — it means 
build things in the real world.

 A newbie’s guide to transferring

 ELLERY ROSENZWEIG | COLUMN

Turn on, tune in and drop out?

LUKE JACOBS | COLUMN

Luke Jacobs can be reached at 

lejacobs@umich.edu.

Ellery Rosenzweig can be reached 

at erosenz@umich.edu.

M

illennials get dumped 
on all the time — on 
TV, on the internet 

and at family gatherings. We’re 
called lazy, unambitious, self-
righteous, 
image-obsessed, 

egocentric cybernauts who would 
rather stare at our phone screens 
than have a conversation. Maybe 
some of this is true, maybe some 
of this is not. If our generation 
really is all of these things — 
which would be terrifying for 
the future of the United States 
— I don’t think any column could 
even remotely describe how 
much trouble we’re in. 

However, there is one clear 

issue our generation faces, 
and it’s not really our fault. In 
fact, this problem was dropped 
on us by baby boomers and 
Generation X. The issue is 
millennials have become so 
accustomed to an on-demand 
world that we expect success 
to be on-demand as well. The 
reason for this is that baby 
boomers and Generation X-ers 
ushered 
in 
a 
technological 

revolution that led to us getting 
whatever we want, when we 
want it.

Think about it: We grew 

up — or, at least, have spent 
the formative years of life — 
with Netflix, smartphones and 
Amazon next-day delivery. We 
hardly had to wait until Thursday 
night to watch our favorite TV 
show. If we wanted to know the 
size of Central Park, we didn’t 
have to walk to the library to 
check out a book — we have 
computers in our pockets. And 
for the last eight years, we’ve 
been able to use our pocket PCs 
to order a ride through Uber, 
meaning we rarely have to wait 
more than five minutes for a car 
to take us where we want to go.

This “on-demandness” is not 

a problem. In fact, it’s great; it 
has revolutionized our economy 
and led to hyper-growth in 
several industries, from ground 
transportation to grocery to 
restaurant. The economics is 

simple: It’s easier for people to 
buy goods and services, people 
buy more goods and services, 
businesses make more money, 
businesses use this money to 
innovate and expand, businesses 
can pay higher wages, people 
make more money, people spend 
more money. It’s a virtuous cycle. 
I have no problem with this, and 
neither should you.

But we’ve made the mistake of 

transferring our attitude toward 
Netflix — “I want to watch it now, 
so I’ll watch it now” — to more 
difficult, important things that 
generations before us had to work 
hard for. These things are not 
on-demand.

Take, for example, a millennial 

trying to learn calculus. If they 
apply their Amazon same-day 
delivery attitude to mastering the 
Taylor series — a representation 
of a function as an infinite 
sum of terms — they might be 
disappointed. Calculus is not your 
coming-soon Amazon purchase: 
You won’t get it that day or the 
next day and maybe not even that 
week or the next week. You have 
to work at it, sometimes for long 
periods of time. I think we look at 
this as a foreign concept now.

We need to understand the 

situation: Our generation has 
lots of advantages, and, as a 
result, we expect things to 
come easy. We get frustrated 
when they don’t. Inevitably, we 
quit, and we never make the 
progress we’re capable of.

This isn’t good, but it doesn’t 

mean we’re lazy, pretentious or 
unaspiring. It doesn’t mean we 
don’t care about people or hate 
talking to others. We just need 
to collectively realize a simple 
fact: things get better if you 
work at them. Most of the time, 
success won’t come right away. 
It’s not your Uber ride — it isn’t 
one minute away. This requires 
understanding that we are not 
going to score a touchdown 
on every play. But if we can 
move the ball down the field 
every time, if we can get a little 

better every day, eventually 
we’ll get somewhere.

An imperfect but somewhat 

illuminating illustration of this 
on-demand attitude came in 2008, 
when Barack Obama ascended to 
the presidency, partly because 
optimistic millennials supported 
him. Obama, armed with his 
hope-and-change 
rhetoric, 

won 66 percent of the vote in 
the 
below-30 
demographic. 

Come Inauguration Day, the 
American 
people 
(especially 

hopeful millennials) anticipated 
near-immediate change amid a 
financial crisis, two wars in the 
Middle East and the impending 
collapse of the U.S. auto industry.

It didn’t come, at least not 

right away. And though there 
are many variables that could 
have affected the following 
statistic, 
it’s 
worth 
noting 

that 60 percent of millennials 
supported Obama in 2012 — 
a high number, sure, but a 
noticeable drop-off from four 
years earlier, when we thought 
success would be immediate.

Again, 
this 
example 
is 

inexact. The precise reasons 
for Obama losing millennial 
support are hard to pin down. 
But my overarching point — 
that we too often hold the false 
belief that achievement is a 
one-step process — has been 
echoed by the former president 
himself. On “The Daily Show” 
in 2010, Obama modified his 
famous slogan: “Yes, we can,” 
he said, before adding, “but it is 
not going to happen overnight.”

Millennials 
should 
heed 

this modification. We can keep 
watching Netflix and using 
Uber, but we can’t transfer 
that same on-demand attitude 
to real life, where hard things 
don’t come easy. We just need 
to keep moving the ball down 
the 
field. 
Eventually, 
we’ll 

score a touchdown..

BILLY STAMPFL | COLUMN
Drop the on-demand attitude 

Billy Stampfl can be reached at 

bstampfl@umich.edu.

NIA LEE | CONTACT NIA AT LEENIA@UMICH.EDU

