Surviving Dorm Life -June 10

So living a few days in the dorm, I have learned a thing or two. One--> sharing 1 bathroom and 1 shower with 6 women, is super fun. It’s especially fun when you don’t know everyone yet and don’t know if people take morning or night showers…It has become a “oh the shower is open, run for it” felling when deciding when I should take a shower. Plus the semester is still in session for my roommates, and I do not know their schedules for class and exams start next week. Lastly, there is no dorm-wide wifi. There are cords you can use to connect or the room has to get a router. Luckily my roommates have a router! Unfortunately this means I have been making my 3-4 am video calls to US in the hallway so I don't wake up my roommates since noise doesn't travel as well through the hallway door than it travels through our kitchen/living area. 

To my understanding, education in Poland is free. So public education k-12 AND University studies can be free (as long as you don’t fail your classes too many times). Which does sounds like pretty good motivation not to fail your classes if you ask me! Interestingly, its a 2-5 strike limit for the number of times you can fail most classes before you have to pay a fee, so many people take 5-6 years to earn a bachelors if they need to re-take failed classes. While a free education system sounds wonderful, coming from the US where our tuition can be outrageous even at public universities, it does have a downside. For instance, [because education is free] “Poland is producing a lot of people with useless majors like Aerospace Engineering, and Psychology.” Ha, I’m not 100% sure why these two were lumped together besides a bias opinion on not having a good faculty for aerospace engineering here, but it still makes me laugh. On a more serious note, one reason I disagree with making tuition free in the US is because I think it will devalue degrees, oversaturate the market, and encourage everyone to get a degree even for something useless / something that doesn’t really require a degree just because it is free to them to get it. And this is exactly what is happening in many places in Europe and even in Columbia; there are too many people with comparable degrees and in order to even be considered for a job now you have to have a Masters or higher because almost everyone has a bachelors. While having more knowledge may be helpful, it sounds like it is quickly becoming the need for a piece of paper, vs. actually requiring a higher degree to do the job well; which is something I don’t agree with. Now that being said, making higher education affordable is something I am 100% in favor of because the trend of US university prices has become insane over the last few decades. 

After dark, I chose to have a quiet night and simply finish all the editing and uploading of the best of my India pictures. So after many hours from the airport and tonight, I was finally able to complete my upload and finish my India album. So if you’d like to see more of my India photos than the ones I shared on this blog, check out my Facebook. 

A sign in my lab- a good reminder for people in STEM fields