Pre-Reading Blog #1

College has been pretty good to me. I'm infinitely glad that I chose to attend a JC, because it gave me time to sort through my options and find what I liked to do, and what I may want to do with my life. Out of high school, I was hell-bent on becoming an architect, which I now know would have been a disastrous choice. Apparently, being an architect requires loads and loads of calculus and physics, neither of which I enjoy/excel at/ever want to do again. While I may have missed out on part of the "college experience" by going to Sierra, I avoided making a $40,000 mistake by going directly for a university and making a drastic major-change two semesters in.

I didn't enjoy high school. I skated through it, exerting as little effort as possible, at least when it came to homework. I enjoyed learning in class, and I always scored well on quizzes and tests, but I never thought that homework was necessary, which caused my grades to suffer.

Anyway, I'm putting forth a lot more effort now, and I'm ready to work hard to get where I want to go. I'm excited to actually use my classes to my advantage to help me form a distinct personal image, I guess, or maybe to better define myself. 

Why are college students more inclined to work toward their academic goals, or, for that matter, to even maintain an academic goal at all? 

Rationalism - believing that reason alone is a source of knowledge, independent of experience.

Anti-Rationalism - the opposite of rationalism, the belief that sensual or emotional experience leads to knowledge.

Fundamentalism - the strict adherence to a specific doctrine of thought or ideology.