My expe­ri­ence at Ferris State University was one with many vari­ables and mul­ti­ple paths that ulti­mately led me in unex­pected directions.

I came to Ferris for the hotel man­age­ment pro­gram in the fall of 2006. It took me around a semes­ter to real­ize that this field was not the right fit for me and that I wanted to do some­thing with the field of writ­ing. This is where I stepped into journalism.

For my lat­ter three years of col­lege I have stud­ied jour­nal­ism along with the two minors I picked up along the way, polit­i­cal sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy. I have had a very inter­dis­ci­pli­nary expe­ri­ence at Ferris, and this has helped me to take the next step, grad­u­ate school.

Ferris is known around the state and wider Midwest region as a career school, a tech­ni­cal school and var­i­ous other titles of a uni­ver­sity that is focused on get­ting stu­dents a job post-graduation. Only in recent years have a few pro­grams sprouted up that are more on the lib­eral arts side of education.

Admittedly, I am much more of a lib­eral arts type of stu­dent. I feel that learn­ing should be val­ued for its own sake and for the fact that it can bet­ter the indi­vid­ual, inde­pen­dent of future career oppor­tu­ni­ties. Because of this mind­set, I have often felt out of place here.

The fact that Ferris is so career-driven is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing. I hap­pen to pre­fer a dif­fer­ent style of edu­ca­tion, but there is value in focus­ing an edu­ca­tion toward a career.

There are a select num­ber of pro­fes­sors and pro­grams in which one can tell they truly want to be in the aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ment and they want their stu­dents to learn for more than sim­ply “sur­viv­ing in the work world.” If one looks closely and researches his or her pro­fes­sors, the Ferris expe­ri­ence can be adapted to any student’s needs and desires.

This strat­egy worked for me because now I am off to get my Masters in social and polit­i­cal thought at the University of Sussex in south­ern England. My inter­dis­ci­pli­nary under­grad­u­ate degree proved very favor­able to a pro­gram of this breed.

My advice in clos­ing, as this is my last col­umn here at the Torch, is to embrace your field of study for all it is worth, and under­stand the value in classes out­side of that con­cen­tra­tion. Learning about other ideas can only illu­mi­nate the areas you came here to study.

The uni­ver­sity is a very spe­cial place. I believe there is a seri­ous inter­nal matu­rity that a stu­dent goes through in attend­ing col­lege that a per­son doesn’t get with­out it. So, go out there and learn about many things, exer­cise intel­lec­tual free­dom and expe­ri­ence the world; it can only lead you in a bet­ter direc­tion. n