Dickinson College

2 months ago

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