Friday, August 20, 2010

U of M Summer Bridge Program

You apply to the University of Michigan, you get in (yay!), but they say you are required to attend what they call the "Summer Bridge Program".

I went into the Bridge program with high hopes. I was excited to get immersed into college life and get to know campus. Things were going well in the nice air conditioned dormitory and the food was delicious! The classes were ridiculously easy and yet you had to attend and participate or else you were at risk for getting kicked out of Bridge.
Ok, I can take that, easy classes (which are worth credits!). I really hated waking up sooo early for math to be honest! Oh well.

The kicker for Bridge was the "mandatory events"
These were completely useless. (Well, most of them anyways)
If we did not attend these "events" we were written up or required to write a 10 page paper! What is even worse about these events is a lot of them were spur of the moment. The PAs would tell us the day before or even hours before about the event we were required to attend. When you are an adult away at college you do make plans!

I remember a couple specific events that really pissed me off. The first one was not on any schedule any where, we were told that there was a "surprise" mandatory event in two hours. The problem was that a large group of friends and I had made plans to go and see "Despicable Me" in an hour. We had this plan for about a week. We told the PAs we had these plans and we had had them for a week and they just told us that "sometimes there are things you just have to do". We were all thinking, this better be important, PAs are making a big enough fuss over it. So, two hours later we show up....what is it? It's a water balloon fight. We sat on a hill, the water balloon fight happened (with not nearly enough water balloons for everyone, they actually had to run around in little groups, one balloon per like 4 people) After about 45 seconds it was all over. That was it. They didn't even take attendance. We missed our movie for the lamest mandatory water balloon fight in history.

The next mandatory event was quite ridiculous also. During this one, everyone had midterms coming up and important papers to write for class. But, with a 4 hour notice we were notified via e-mail (and what if we decided not to check out e-mail that day, you'll see) that we were required to go to "The Arb" as a group for group activities. The Arb is like a mini forest with a couple clearings and like garden thing. So we all went to this thing (thinking about our papers and study time). The PAs led us to one of the clearings and we had a relay race. Then they tried to get us to play duck duck goose. (Really? And they keep calling us "adults", when was the last time you played mandatory duck duck goose?) Then we had to play tag, if you didn't participate in tag you had to write a 5 page paper. Seriously. What on earth am I supposed to be getting out of this!? This all took about 3 hours. 3 hours of wasted time. I hate my time wasted! One of my biggest pet peeves is my time wasted, just please, don't do it.
Now, what if you didn't get that e-mail?
The next day I was talking with one of my girlfriends. She was telling me about how it was her sister or cousins or bff's birthday (someone close to her) so they all went out to the mall and out to dinner. She never got the e-mail and she wasn't around to hear word of mouth. There are no rules about going into town, etc. She got in trouble. She was told she needed to write a 10 page paper. When she went to the "boss" of the PAs to explain what had happened, he told her it was her fault she didn't attend therefore she needs to write the paper. Yes, this is stupid.

Bridge Program. Should be shorter. Enough to know the campus. Not enough to waste my entire summer. Oh well, I'm moving out today! For a 10 day break and then on to Fall Term where I will be over worked and under rested!

1 comments:

Meow said...

Are you into the summer bridge program or was that more of an automated response type thing?

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