Last August, I resigned from my remote Computer Security job, and started as an undergraduate student at Berea College. You might be wondering why I left the industry to go back to college, and well it’s simple. Most employers I want to work at (e.g. .gov) or hedge funds still require at least a Bachelor’s unfortunately. Event though I have over two years of full-time experience, have worked at placed like IBM, and Microsoft, and found two 0days, I still get disqualifed due to the lack of pedigree. So, when I heard about Berea College in the Midwest Venture Partners Slack server (owned by tptacek, their Hacker New username)
I thought that I should apply, and I got accepted! Berea attends to only admit low-income students who otherwise couldn’t of went to college, and since my mom is disabled, I qualified BTW [0]. I’m majoring in Computer Science, and I transfered from Tulane. Like Aaron Swartz’s “Stanford Diaries” I wanted to share my experience at college, albiet not post daily blog posts lik Swartz did [1].
Like Swartz, Sowell, Holt, and others, I don’t like education very well and I guess that I have let others know that. When asked what I think of Berea so far, I’ve replied: “It’s like a jail. My room is small, my mattress is like that one a person in jail gets.”. I’ve evened told Dr. Nixion this, who laughed, and probably thought I was joking and I’m not. We aren’t allowed to install Veracrypt, or image a new OS, as well as having a lot of other limitations on our campus provided laptops (which I’ve been told I can keep post grad). There’s Microsoft’s EDR installed on our machines, and IT/IS&S probably has the capability to remotely run and execute a PE on our machines. I can technically disable EDR, Dell’s anonnying updater etc, and then spoof any CRC/heartbeat checks, but that’d probably get me kicked out, lol.
The first week of student orientation was annoying and exhaustive. There were daily required events and meeting which were powerslides going over basic things with some crowd questions thrown in. Then of course there was praying, and other religious stuff. This included similar things on the weekends as well which irked me since I was used to having the weekends to myself to do R&R.
The second week which included introduction to labor and classes was boring and anonnying. I still wish that the lecture slides and a recording of the lecture would be uploaded on Moodle (yes, Berea uses Moodle instead of Canvas like many other colleges), so I could skip the noise to the high signal stuff instead of feeling like I’m watching a boring YouTube video that I can’t skip.
The third week and on were just more of the same stuff. Lectures with has more PowerSlides and boring unskipable lectures with sometimes a tirade and crowd participation mixed in. Work is just helping students when they ask or need help with Computer Science stuff.
Berea’s Student Health Insurance is garbage, and the local health services, specifically mental health doesn’t accept insurance which screws over essentially every student at Berea [2]. There’s free licensed therapist on campus, but they haven’t been great in my experience and I think one shared HIPAA protected info internally to other Berea faculty (yes, I’ve reported the violation). Also, the White House clinic nurse psychiatrist is against perscribing Adderal and Xanax. Since my mom is on Medicare and I can’t afford to pay the premium for even private Bronze insurance, and since many mental health services places locally don’t accept insurance at all, then I’m sort of screwed [4]. I wonder if other Berea students aren’t able to get on their parents insurance (which is capped at age 26 btw) and have a similar issue. I’ve brought this up internally at Berea to the budsman and the person in charge of insurance, but haven’t heard anything yet despite multiple follow ups. I got in trouble too for cursing in an email saying it’s bit of a joke now that still nothing has been done which some Berea staff thought was uncivil (lol).
Every student is required to work at least 10 hours per week, and I was lucky enough to work in Engineering/Computer Science as a lab assistant. However, I’ve heard horror stories of freshman being foisted in to janitor (at dining), or grounds jobs and they can’t move out of them. Especially if they fired from their past job. There’s news article documenting how awful working in dining, and from the few people I know who work in dining, it does suck and Gus (the Budsman) tried to censor the articles. Which I’ve heard, that Berea fucked off after getting a legal letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education [5][6]. Speaking of The Berea Torch, I told The Berea Torch founder/writier Ülvi Gitaliyev about the Berea medicial issue, and I had the following conversation with him Him: “We aren’t your slave” Me: “So, I’m supposed to do your job for you and write the entire article myself?” Him: “well we aren’t paid” Me: “There’s lots of journalists not paid that still investigate and write thing” him: “well we don’t have time. As you know Berea is pretty busy” me: “…” him: “send us more information.”. So I figured I’d go ahead and write about it myself.
The “Free Tution Promise” is bit misleading or a scam, because there’s many students who still pay out of pocket, and one student who is international still has to pay $20,000 per year I recall. It’s less than other colleges, sure, but not 100% free. Also, the federal government gives Berea funding each year to pay it’s student workers ($6/hr) which is below min wage, but Berea says other aid results in it being $34/hr, but the rest goes towards your tution and you don’t get the actual cash like the $6/hr.
There’s private security on campus called “Public Safety Officers”, which is confusing imo since only students and Berea employees can use Public Safety. Public Safety wrongly ticketed my car three times even with the proper decals, but they voided all the improper tickets and eventually stopped doing it. I had a pair of expensive shorts stolen from my laundry, but they still haven’t found them unfortunately, so I’m burned out of $60 and have to continue using the same washing/drying machines.
Cheating happends often at Berea. Students have learned to use LLVM and other AI models like Google Bard to make their papers etc by asking it about the citiations off of Wikipedia about the subject they have to write about, and then either use a rephrasing site/app or tell ChatGPT to rephrase to as a human and use bogus citiations with some real ones mixed in.
I often hear Berea employees talking about the Berea “community” and President Nixon (no, not the former POTUS Nixon) mentioned that we, students are “Bereans” and that it’s unique which it isn’t. Companies like Google, and Meta call their employees Googlers and Metamates (eww), so it’s not a unique thing. The “community” bit I found to be superficial. Berea College is just a bubble and there’s cliques instead of a legit community.
