Dickinson College

5 months ago

Sean M. Donahue

In my case, the job was specifically part of the same field that I had just come from out of the US military. I explicitly told the admissions office and the international studies advisor what I wanted and the explicitly insisted that they were perfect for it. So, I did not approach Dickinson with the desire to become well rounded and be able to perform a multitude of tasks. Instead, I explicitly stated what I wanted and turned down any stopped speaking to or interacting with any college that said it couldn't get me what I wanted. For example, I was offered admissions with scholarship into Layfayette but turned it down because the admissions office expressed doubts as to weather my specific goals were definitely going to be realized. Dickinson did the opposite. Dickinson fell all over itself bragging about its connections and greatness. But they did not use those connections and greatness to get me the job that I made it clear to them I wanted. Their lack of intention to do so and your claim (as a Dickinson alumnus) that it wasn't there responsibility should have been stated clearly to me at the beginning but wasn't. ----------------------- In my case, Dickinson got me further and further away from where I was an where I wanted to be. Dickinson not only did not advance me down the path that I was already on but it got me off that path. Further, when I entered graduate school in International Affairs at Columbia after graduating Phi Beta Kappa and 27th in my class at Dickinson, I found that Dickinson 's coursework and the school in general left me far less prepared than I expected it to. Still further, I tried to bring this up with the International Studies advisor so that the very next generation of students would be better prepared but he did not want to hear that there should be a math requirement that takes all students completely through calculus 3 and linear algebra and also at least one calculus based statistics class. Yet, he insisted on teaching his students to pipe off about statistics or any other randomly selected piece of information that they could use as a weapon to justify their arguments. However, there was never any emphasis to expect one to truly understand where the fact came from NOR any emphasis to ensure that they understood what they were saying. But the faculty are the very same way. ---------------------------- Everything at Dickinson is orchestrated, like a political campaign and opinions are handed out at the door. At Dickinson, you must be very careful what you say because grades are handed out based on it. But beyond the lacking International Studies program, the Language programs are lacking. I took three summers of intensive Chinese at Middlebury's Summer Language School and one intensive summer at Indiana University. When I went to Indiana's summer program, I had to start over from the beginning--day one-- ni3 hao3-- but by the time I was done, I very far ahead of my peers at Dickinson, you can ask the Chinese advisor/prof if you so choose. Later, when at Middlebury, I had a class with another Dickinson grad who started talking to me about Dickinson's Chinese program and said to me half way through our Middlebury level 4 class in reference to Dickinson; "WE GOT GYPPED." I think I have much more liberal arts experience than you and I am in a much better position to evaluate the usefulness of the specific institution that I am taking about, Dickinson. ------------------------------------From your words, I see that you are regurgitating the standard Dickinson tactic. I criticize Dickinson and you defend liberal arts education everywhere. I did not criticize liberal arts education everywhere, only at Dickinson. I said that "Dickinson Was the Greatest Lie Anyone Ever Told Me." I didn't say all education was. Read the criticism carefully. I went to Dickinson, just as I went to several other colleges and universities. I said, I want this. Only Dickinson said to me that it was the "perfect" place to get that. I took Dickinson at its word and Dickinson did not deliver. Get it?????--------------------Finally, I never stated that I wanted to be a subordinated unskilled staffer performing multiple tasks. That is the exact thing I don't want and the exact thing that I look down upon Dickinson for. It trains it students to be multitasking administrative subordinates. You don't need to spend $45,000/year to learn how to multitask. -------------------------------Beyond that, if you were paying for you tuition through 2012, you would not agree with your own claim that it is not Dickinson's responsibility to get its graduates jobs. If your parents are paying out of pocket for that tuition, they may disagree with you. If you will be graduating with well over $100,000 in student loans, you may disagree with yourself in a few years. ------------------------There does need to be a change in the criteria for which Americans qualify for student loans. That criteria need to constrain all government backed student loans to only those degrees and schools that will guarantee employment at a level of salary that could not have been had without the degree or program.------------------------------- Finally, what makes you so sure that the specific job I told Dickinson I wanted involved performing a specific technical task? It didn't. It was a very high level job along the same path that I came from. Before Dickinson, I served in the secretive Special Operations helicopter unit that was shot down in Somalia flying delta force and rangers to their targets. I was part of hunting missile launchers in Iraq during the first Gulf War and part of rescuing a hostage in Panama and part of rescuing an Embassy in El Salvador. I grew disgusted by the misuse of American Special Operations and Intelligence Forces. Dickinson likes to present that it has the kinds of connections into that world that a Yale would have with its skull and bones crowd. I saw the inside of secret US military compounds many times before I even applied to Dickinson. I never saw one afterwards. ------------------- One of the most revealing moments that showed me how little Dickinson truly knew was when Neil Wiesman expressed his dissatisfaction to me that he did not know that we has a National Reconnaissance Office. He felt left out. I realize that Dickinson was charging me money for tuition but sponging off of me and my experiences. Further, any and all attempts to take the subject out of the theory of the political science department and put it into the realm of logistics, tactics and the "multiple tasks" you mentioned, persistently fell on deaf and dead ears.--------------------------- Bottom line; Professor Don't Know! and should not have had to spend my GI Bill on that, especially given the fact that I explicitly stated exactly what I wanted out of the education and they explicitly stated that they were "perfect". They either lied or were incompetent. -----------------------------------------------Sincerely,---------Sean----M.----Donahue

6 months ago

Michelle Kyper

I would just like to comment that if you wanted to go to school to learn how to do a particular job, that's called a trade school. A trade school will teach you how to do one particular thing. A liberal arts school, like Dickinson College, does not teach you how to perform one particular task that is required to get a job, NOR is it their responsibilty to find you a job upon graduation. The point of a liberal arts college is to provide you with a well-rounded education that will prepare you to be able to perform multiple tasks.

about 1 year ago

Sean M. Donahue smd51 ((at)) columbia dot edu

Dickinson College Was The Greatest Lie Anyone Ever Told Me Dear Dickinson College Faculty, Staff, Other Employees, ( And Prospective College Students Everywhere, Various Secondary Schools, Journalists and Citizens of All Countries) The greatest lie ever told to me was when Angela Barone (Franandez), an admissions officer at Dickinson College said to me something to the effect of Dickinson is the perfect place for you. Dickinson was so intrigued by my background in military Special Operations and Military Intelligence and Gulf War I, that it gave no thought to my future. Yet, my personal statement, my every motivation and my every word spoken during both my admissions interview and my every moment at Dickinson was persistently about what I wanted for me in my own future. I contributed to class discussions as agreed to by accepting admission and completed all academic assignments. Yet, I received no job skills and no job in return. This was despite having been told that Dickinson College was the perfect place for me to get what I wanted out of life. What Dickinson College did give me was not what I asked for. I never made any claim that I wanted to learn how to be creative or learn how write essay papers, which no one will pay you to do unless you become a professor. Yet, I never said that I wanted to become a professor. When I approached Dickinson College, I did so on the referral of an Insurance Salesman who knew Angela Barone's father and who I met while taking a continuing education class in using Lotus at Penn State Hazleton. I had just gotten out of the Army and mentioned to the individual that I had applied to Lafayette College, which did later offered me admission. I had never before heard of Dickinson College and it was not included in the list of schools that my former military commanders and superior officers and an aunt who was a college professor recommended I apply to. I decided to at least check Dickinson out. When I approached Dickinson, I said this is what I want and Dickinson replied by claiming not only that it could provide it but that it was the perfect place for me to get what I wanted. Yet, upon completing my degree at Dickinson, getting Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Dickinson College failed to follow though and deliver the job that I said I wanted to get and that it claimed it was the perfect place to provide. What is more, Dickinson College was never capable of delivering the job I wanted and persistently failed to recognize that in itself and persistently failed to openly acknowledge its limitations as an institution. Dickinson College was marketing what it wanted to be, rather than what it actually was. It turned out to be no different than any department store or franchise making grand claims about its product or service but after you buy it, it fails to live up to the expectations you forthrightly and openly placed on it at the moment of purchase. When I applied to Dickinson College I expressed clearly in my personal statement and admissions interview what job I wanted and Dickinson accepted me by telling me, falsely, that it was the perfect college for me. If Dickinson was not capable of getting me that job and knew that it couldn't, it should not have taken my GI Bill, Veterans Grants, Pell Grants and student loan money from me. I could have used that money to get trained in something that I could have gotten a job in. You can't admit people because you want to believe that you as an institution are capable of getting someone something. You have to ask how realistic the stated objective is. You also cannot accept someone with the idea that they will learn to be flexible and settle for something else. That is not your call to make, especially with an overbearing sense of institutional authority.. When I was leaving Dickinson, Stuart started to suggest that I look at the Congressional Research Service or at American and George Washington Universities. Yet, I never expressed any interests in any of those things in my personal statement. Stuart failed to understand the purpose for which I was paying tuition and the of the college and his program in that pursuit. Attending a college is a consumer transaction and if you cannot get someone from where they are when they apply to where they want to be when they graduate, you should not take their money. If you do, you are tricking individuals into believing that you are selling them something other than what they agreed to purchase. In my case, you took the only money that I had. That was money that I could have used that to get a job producing degree. Your career services office once told me that I must rely on my connections to get ahead in life. In doing so, Dickinson College failed to realize that if I came from the family background that made it easy to just attend a liberal arts college and then get a job through family connections, I would never have had to serve in the military to get the GI Bill in the fist place. Further, if I had such connections, I would not have wasted time and money getting an education to attain they same paycheck that I could have had without the education. But my well being was not part of the considerations made by Dickinson when it decided to accept the cash from my GI Bill, Pell Grant, Veterans Grant and student loans. The reason you admitted me and took my money was simply because Dickinson's enrollment was down and you wanted to round out your statistics with a well balanced class profile. The emphasis of you admissions decision was on what you felt I would bring to the college, rather than on what your responsibility was to me. You wanted to make the diversity data to look good and vicariously expose the spoiled rich kids to the experience of the working class by having a few in the student body. You liked having someone in the classroom who had real world experience and could talk about how American foreign policy actually played out on the ground because he was there. You placed value and emphasis on giving the rich kids exposure to a working class person who went to school using the GI Bill because as Zwemer once told my classmates and me, part of their learning experience is to learn how to interact with people like me because when they graduate there will be many more. In his mind, my presence was to be for the benefit of the rich kids. I was tolerated but never welcome. Yet, you took my money that I was paying you to get me the job I wanted. I was not paying for, what you deemed as the privilege to be around the rich kids and self proclaimed esteemed faculty like yourselves. You gave no thought to what I was going to get out of the education and every time I tried to point out to Stuart what I wanted and what I saw as the obvious flaw of disorganization in the liberal arts education, he just brushed me off. He did so with an incessant, he knows best attitude but never stopped to ask himself if he actually knows anything at all. I wanted job and prosperity but all you sold me was a useless certificate. Since the moment of the purchase, I have neither encountered any individuals or institutions that have offered me a job because I graduated from Dickinson and the only jobs that have ever been available to me are the very same jobs that I could have had without a Dickinson degree. This renders the degree both useless and of no true tangible or realizable value. It is by no means an investment and its projected benefit in life that was and continues to be advertised by Dickinson College constitutes false advertising. Therefore, you owe me for the full cost of my education at Dickinson, including the opportunity cost and all costs must be brought forward to present value. You must remove my degree from my transcript, annotating that the degree was renounced upon my instruction and you must provide me with the additional replacement funding necessary to retrain into a job producing real labor skill that is of tangible and attainable practical value. You must also compensate me for the fact that employers do not hire liberal arts graduates for technical jobs. Instead, they hire people with either two year tech degrees or no higher education at all before they hire liberal arts majors. My Dickinson degree is a handicap, not an asset. Unlike Scadato suggested, I cannot leave out of my resume the fact that I attended college for those years because it would leave that time unaccounted for. If sever years are unaccounted for, people assume you must have been in prison, on the lamb or deserted from military service. Sean M. Donahue Alumnus Dickinson College, BA 1997 (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude) Columbia University MIA, SIPA 2001 MA Statistics 2005 Mandarin Chinese, Middlebury College Levels 3,4,5 Mandarin Chinese Indiana-U, CET Level 1