What’s hilarious is that, cops, in my province, have to go to college for 3 years (with Calculus 1) before even getting the chance of stepping into police academy, and yes if they fail Philosophy I over and over and over (and there’s 3 mandatory philosophy classes), they can’t be cops, I know a couple knuckleheads who were filtered away by the system this way with the mandatory french and french canadian litterature classes and the philosophy classes, oh also the english mandatory classes.

Anyway, here it’s always been about 75% grants-25% loans if you live on your own. The first years of my life I never had to live on my own, I lived with my mom where we could see the college towers from home, walking/bus distance from the local college so I just got 1000 dollar loans to get my books and didn’t have that much left after those expenses. Please take note that if my parents were living together, they fortunately (yes, long story…) divorced in my last year of high school, so, because I was living with my mom, I could get those small loans and later loans & grants when I went to a different college and lived on campus. My dad is too rich apparently for me to get any grants, so it would have been all loans. He’s also too rich now, since a while, if I needed welfare, i’d have to fabricate a story about my dad not wanting to talk to me ever, because they changed the rules and my dad’s just too damn rich ya know. (Makes about 56k, which isn’t anything mind blowing, and hell I think he made much less in my earlier college years, 40k maybe).

We all get f’d in different ways, hooray? Especially for those who of us who decide to study fields difficult to impossible to really learn at home…

I had way much more fun reading things like the Rhodium Archive and books like Pikhal and Tikhal, organic chemistry is what interests me the most, because, it’s all of life, I could speak about carbon itself for hours but I find most people aren’t interested hehe.

I agree with NotDole that the practical aspects of science and engineering degrees would be difficult to learn. During my Biology degree there was a great deal of lab work involved. But even that may change if we are clever about it. The Open University which has operated for years in the UK (and is really quite expensive) holds meet up tutorials and summer camps for practical sessions. The maker and hacker community are expanding into science subjects and electronics with do-it-yourself learning and kitchen and garage laboratories.

Also when can a simulation replace a real hands-on experiment and when is a real-lab based experiment required. When I was at University we had some expensive bits of kit – electron microscope for example – but we weren’t allowed to touch it anyway. So let’s continue to think of more and more ways to self-empower and self study. And we can be selective too. I have never ever had the need to utilise my skills in plant tissue culture microprogation or describe all of the biochemical steps involved in the Citric acid cycle since 1989.

Does anybody know where and how to learn to communicate?
My communication was horrible but is improved with my various languages, does anybody else know of a way to learn this VERY important skill? This is not only a skill that must be learned be honed as well.