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"Oh wow that is expensive"
The words that I uttered when the first bill came for my first month of rent senior year of college. Living in Washington D.C. is anything but affordable, especially if you are paying tuition on top of your living expenses.
Nobody really talks about how hard it is to find regular hours to work as a college student. We are paying thousands of dollars a year and adding to it each month to eat and sleep without being able to work 30-40 hours a week to support that.
The problem with university in America is that it is seen as a right of passage to the next phase of your life. Employers care whether or not you have a degree, but will never actually ask you what you spent time learning or how you felt during your years in school.
It is easy to forget about the hours of stress that come from studying and from adapting to a whole new way of life. For those who go to school outside the comfort of their own home town just as I did, you have to find your group of people all over again that you want to associate with and trust.
Nobody at a job interview is ever asked how long it took them before they found a friend that they trusted at college. Nobody is ever asked what types of stressors were added to their lives during college. Nobody is ever asked what types of extra hoops they had to go through in order to support themselves at school.
Rather, we are asked:
"What did you major in?"
"Where did you go?"
"What was your GPA?"
We are asked questions that provide rank and emphasis on what we did throughout our years that can benefit them, not that I ever really understood what my GPA would mean to an employer that is not giving me a test to take each day I came in.
We are never asked about the things that truly matter to us in this world. Enough being seen as numbers and statistics. We are people and we need to start treating each other as such; the human experience is more valuable than our test scores.