"This is why it’s called a final year," Mr. Frank (our lecturer in the woodwork sector in Civil Engineering) said.
I studied Civil Engineering in a polytechnic, and during the first and second years, it was crazy due to the workload, plus the fact that we were not used to the school system. We had 14 courses, and about 70% of them had practicals attached to them, where we moved from one place to another, engaging in one activity or the other. Most of those days, we closed at 5 p.m., with hunger dealing heavily with our stomachs...for the 'poor' ones😅
It is now laughable how we handled everything back in those days with fear and calmness because we were scared of missing anything that could lead to getting a course carryover. But after the return (4th year after I.T.), we started detecting some things about the lecturers, and that reduced the workload.
Among all the academic workload, the most time-consuming ones were the practicals, especially when we went to the field. Mind you, most of the field practicals did not have anything related to the main discipline, and those practicals frustrated us a lot. This included visiting agricultural farms to stay under the sun while the lecturer stayed under the shade, Physical Education that had us spending half of every Saturday on sports, and Entrepreneurship that almost had us sleeping in the hall twice every week. Gosh!
The practical works related to our course were also very annoying because they appeared like a play and yet were very time-demanding and frustrating, with loads of assignments involving drawings and calculations. Oh, Technical Drawing? It was sweet and interesting, but we were heavily frustrated with the volume of assignments and classwork. You needed to see how we mounted every corner of the school environment, even after the day’s lectures, just to do assignments. It was not something someone else could do for you because everyone was busy, and it was also not something one could copy like the way we copied “writing” assignments.
During the final year of the first two years (OND), it felt as if that year was the deadline for people to study Civil Engineering in the world. The workload was something else, and by then, project work had been added to it, including roofing a house. The project supervisor in charge of our group was not taking it lightly, and it was as if the house we were to roof was going to be his personal office once we were done.
When we asked him why the pressure and unnecessary attacks, considering the workload was already too much, he replied that this was the reason it was called a final year. Crazy lecturer!
School was so tough with the excessive workload, and a lot of people dropped out, not because of school fees, but because they could not cope. This had a lot of negative effects on their results.
Thanks for reading.
The Photo used is mine