Catt+P.+-+NHD+Essay

Revolution ~ Reaction ~ Reform Does " College "  Still Synonymize With " Success " ? By Catt Perry

I began writing this paper because, well, it was an assignment for school. That's what pretty much everyone did, right? I figured that since my entire fourth quarter grade consisted pretty much completely of this project, I ought to give it some real effort. While I began writing this essay simply to receive credit for the assignment, though, the information I sifted through really started hitting home. Throughout the length of the project, my topic became very personal to me. I had been rather interested in the extent of student debt discussions beforehand. Student loans are often debated in mainstream media, but student debt has become a topic that I am now even more passionate about. The best result of this assignment, for me, is my own better and fuller understanding of my own thought. Success isn’t meant to be easy, and I definitely learned that from this assignment! I stumbled quite a bit along the way and even started over halfway through because I felt like I had gotten so much of it mixed up. Understandably, this project is difficult for everyone who has to do it, but for me it was extraordinarily challenging.

It is at this point that I need to state something before continuing: I am a complete perfectionist. If I am going to do something, I am going to do it well. It is because of this that I wanted to create a paper that presented information to the reader in a way that the reader would be able to fully understand the meaning of and relate to. However, doing so requires not only a strong understanding of the subject, but also a vast amount of research. My research originally circled around student debt, which I saw as the result of student loans – both of which are currently equated with a heated and very prevalent debate. The issue of student debt has become one of the main points brought up in the current presidential-election debates. On all of the news channels and late-night TV comedies, discussion about student loans and student debt swirls all around. When you pull up a new Internet page and the Yahoo or MSN homepage appears, it seems like practically every few days there’s a new post, blog or article written about the issue.

One might think that my job of creating this position essay would be made easier by having so much material to work with, but it proved to be exactly the opposite. Once I realized just how much information on my subject was out there, I started to feel like I was trying to wade through a sea of information; and at first I didn’t know where to start looking for the best, most reliable information, so I simply dove in headfirst without much of a plan. But as the due date drew nearer and nearer, I realized that while researching, my arguments had gotten mixed up and my whole “plan” had fallen apart. The problem that surfaced turned out to be that I was struggling //because// I was being faced with so much evidence that my mind was overloaded with it. The media began to seem like an obsessed individual, who was spewing facts and obnoxiously voicing opinions – you know, one of those people that you’re embarrassed to ever be seen with in public because they’re so loud and boisterous that they draw an extreme amount of attention to themselves and to others around them.

While I didn’t have a plan of my own to follow, I thought I had pretty much everything I needed to have figured out. I had been fully under the impression that I knew exactly what my topic, angle, and the issues were going to be, as would be expected, and, of course, I had all the data and examples and testimonies and facts and opinions and perspectives I could ever desire to have.

Then, a week before the final project was due, I had an epiphany. The information that I dug up bewildered me (and yet I didn’t even realize this at the time), and so I continued researching before I really understood what I had already discovered. Thankfully I did come this realization; had I sooner, I likely would not have been nearly as confused as I was throughout my research process. I now understand that it was inevitable that my own research would confuse me; at least I was eventually able to make sense of it. (Note: After debating whether or not to explain my confusion and the precise division between the two angles taken to address the issue, I decided to do so. I was also uncertain if I should introduce a relatively concise explanation of this sort nearer the beginning of my paper or nearer the more in-depth version. The in-depth version is the “meat of the sandwich”, diving into how this relates to that and how this is essential for that to happen and how that is different from this but how this is similar to that making that similar to this – I am of high hopes that my explanation will prove useful to the reader and will clarify information that may otherwise prove to be just as, if not more, confusing to the reader as it was to me.)

I realized that within my research for my paper, I had come across two very different angles attacking the issue of student debt, but both were on the same side. Neither of the two angles opposed the other; they both seemingly agreed that the other was indeed an issue, and merely pronounced that their argument was more prevalent, valid, and significant than the other. One angle was that the real problem was an inability of recent graduates to find work, as this creates a situation in which the individual is incapable of paying back any money they borrowed to pay for their education.