the more i find out about other liberal arts schools, the more i have come to resent so many things about marietta that i never thought of before. sure there was physical plant and cps and some really dense administrators -- i would name them but there were way too many -- but there are things i am beginning to discover as i find out about other schools and other students whose paths are crossing mine. i think marietta dispensed with a lot of the work requirements from other schools. you could get by in quite a few majors with minimally creative bullshit alone. even in physics, i don't think i got the formal background that so many students from other schools receive. but somehow, i came out of it with a legitimate understanding of experimental physics. don't ask me how. i don't think i earned it.

at marietta, you could do dumb things and get away with it. you could steal $10,000 rugs from a dorm, be witnessed, and campus police would bumble the entire investigation. there were a lot of idiots at marietta, and the school made no attempt to improve them; just ship them off with their piece of paper that declared them finished. of course, that happens at every school. i just think marietta was worse than most liberal arts institutions.

so why did it work? it wasn't the school. it wasn't even most of the faculty, although my impression was that a very few faculty members kept it alive (radford, miller, steve rader, dhs to name a few). it was students that defined the school on their own terms and will go on to define the world as their playground that made the marietta experience actually work. out of the 2005 class, it was names like seth wolfson, casey trail, and melissa yusko that fit the description. no matter how soft and laid back marietta was, people like those three were going to excel anyway. the fantastic thing is that they pulled the rest of us up -- or at least pointed out how to do it.

and here i am. analyzing all of it. so i got something out of it right? and in theory, i get the rest of my classwork background in the next couple of years and can counteract everything marietta was deficient in and get the best of both worlds. of course i have to work harder in the mean time. damn.

a