-
Homesickness: how to cope with being away from the nest
Illustration by Sarah FaulknerMark Linn -
Copy Editor
copyed@insideuab.com
As new freshmen head to class for the first time, many of them are also having to deal with a completely new environment, some living hundreds of miles away from home for what might be the first time in their lives.
But feelings of homesickness are completely normal, and experienced by the vast majority of first-time college students, according to Josh Klapow, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and associate professor at UAB.
“Most students who are homesick feel like they’re embarrassed, they don’t want to say anything, you know, they don’t want people to know,” said Klapow, who noted that somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of new students report feeling homesick.
-
Why get a college education?
Letter to the Editor. Illustration by Sarah FaulknerMatt King, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Philosophy
mattking@uab.edu
Dear Students,
What’s the main purpose of a college education? Increasingly, we hear that it is to help you get a job. While no doubt securing a bachelor’s degree helps one on the job market, this thinking is dangerous. If we allow that the value of a degree lies primarily in what the credentials will get you, it suggests that fields of undergraduate study that don’t contribute directly to employment outcomes for its students should be scrapped. It means that we should tie the value of departments and programs directly to how their students fare on the job market.
-
Your college education is being ruined by unnecessary rules
The Board of Trustees makes the rules. Photo by Sarah FaulknerWallace Golding - Contributer
wsgoldin@uab.edu
I resent the American collegiate education system, but not for the reasons many of you may think. It is not the outrageous cost of my education that angers me, nor is it the rampant corruption that seems to have taken university officials by storm. Rather, it is the overriding and counterintuitive themes of censorship and political correctness on college campuses that I find so irritating. Speech codes and free speech zones are components of a broken machine, and they are ruining your college education.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I am in no way advocating for the use of discriminatory speech on college campuses or anywhere else in society. I do not condone the practice of derogatory or slanderous language, and I am not suggesting that we all abandon our personal filters.
Instead, I am proposing that we all reconsider why we spend thousands of dollars each year on tuition.
