One of the debates I have with many across campus is the failure to distinguish between being a member of a profession and being a student. I often throw a jab at one of my roommates because nowhere have I found this more than on the west side of campus and I suspect I am not alone. I don’t want to give outsized blame to the College of Engineering because the same problem can be found in other concentrations, but we’ve all experienced the guy from our freshman dorm floor who called himself an aerospace engineer the fourth week of school.

As a Cyclone Aide two summers ago, I was able to experience this arrogance when helping new students during summer orientation. Think about it: some of these folks hadn’t even registered for classes yet and were calling themselves engineers. More often than not, I see many of these students in my political science classes or walking out of large auditoriums in Gerdin. I’m not demeaning business or political science students, among whose ranks I’ve been counted since my freshman year, but it is emblematic of two very real problems in undergraduate life.

The first is that all too often students are in love with the idea of a major more than they are with the profession. You can see this in schools across the country where a majority of students change their major at least once. The choice of major has become a definitive cliché in a college environment where being undecided is derogatory and insecurity is a display of weakness, leading in part to overconfidence.

The second is ignorance of what constitutes a profession. While I won’t take away from the good work of our peers in Hoover and Town, becoming a professional engineer requires more than passing Chemistry 177. It takes a four-year degree, a licensure, apprenticeship and professional tests. Here I should again stress that this attitude is not exclusive to one college. If you ask some folks what they are studying, they’ll answer with two or three majors and throw in a pre-med or pre-law for good measure. The worst part of these interactions is that pre-something’s often don’t matter on top of making listeners want to cut their ears off.

It’s much more exciting to remember that in our stint at Iowa State we are students first, always. From time to time, we may simulate or engage in our desired profession, but practicing politics is as far away from the real thing as pass-fail engineering learning communities are from building a bridge. In college, we have first and foremost the opportunity and responsibility to learn. When we attempt to change what it is to be a student we take away from the experience; the gen eds, campus clubs, relationships and more. Nothing says it better than the script in the Memorial Union west entrance, “We come to college not alone to prepare to make a living, but to learn to live a life.”