He came home from one of his college orientation talks to high school sophomores and vented on X (formerly Twitter) like he had never done before. “They will be given wafers in life that will freak out”, wrote the anthropologist from the Rovira i Virgili University, Alba Medina, referring to the students present in her last class.
That day, she admits, she was “disgusted” because the university orientation class had gone badly. But that session was only the final straw for the impotence accumulated in the curriculum of this anthropologist, who in the last talks notices a greater lack of interest among the students, who are just a step away from university. This year he has the perception that the “apathy, apathy and disinterest” of these students have increased. A reality, warns Alba Medina, “very serious”.
The heated reflections of this guidance counselor, which have gone viral, invite, at the very least, reflection. “In other years, I didn’t find people so apathetic or so rude; there was the typical gracioset and that’s it, but this year there are many groups that don’t attend”, he repeats in La Vanguardia, as Jordi Basté explained yesterday morning, in El món on RAC1. “Teenagers who are unable to maintain attention for 30 minutes straight, who talk and laugh, who boycott the talk and show zero respect for me and the university student who accompanies me to explain things that high school should interest them”, he wrote on his X account.
Medina wants to make it clear, given the repercussion of his words on the web, that at no time is he generalizing. “Obviously there are applied groups!”, he exclaims. But the balance is tipping too far to one side. At least in their talks, in which insults and impertinences begin to win the reflections and questions that should be expected among these students.
Alba Medina is active on the networks, where she shares many of her thoughts. And she will continue in that line, since, although she admits that in this case she may have exposed her feelings too much and it is not always good to write “hot”, she is convinced that the debate generated by her words “is positive”. This anthropologist, in love with her work as a university guidance counselor, was not surprised by the fact that her reflections had gone viral, but by “the large number of messages from teachers congratulating me and saying that it was about time that someone explain all this”. It is still paradoxical, for Medina, that the teachers who live daily these unpleasant situations that she suffers only in some of the talks keep so silent.
This guidance counselor from Rovira i Virgili tries to make it clear, however discouraged she may be when things don’t go well, that she plans to continue giving her all to the talks. Only she knows how gratifying it is to see that “my advice can guide, help or guide a decision of a second-year high school student who is not quite sure what future he wants”. This, even if it is only in one case, is already for Alba Medina “the best of the rewards”.
The anthropologist – she repeats that her intention is not to dramatize or generalize – only aims with these reflections to mark future guidelines on how to focus or program a student’s passage to university in order to help the student. He believes, from experience, that things are not going the right way. And he gives examples of the two extremes he battles with in the classrooms. “We go from the applied Medicine student, hysterical about the PAU tests (university entrance tests), to the student who responds with great apathy when asked what interests him most or where it can be seen at work that the only thing that worries him in this life is making money”.
And it is at this point, referring to the last answer, when this anthropologist opens another box of educational thrones. Alba Medina wonders what students do in second year high school classes who already know they will not go to university, either because they will never get the cut or simply because they have already decided they will do something else. A scenario in front of which it is very difficult to arouse the interest of a university guidance counselor, since for these students what someone who comes from this world can tell them does not matter to them.
And he wonders if the apathy or lack of prospects are not also to blame “the parents who force their children to do high school, when they could be doing other training cycles that would interest them more”. Another debate that comes up – points out this university guidance counselor – is “the bad reputation that professional training continues to have for some”. This is something that does not quite understand Alba Medina, who was already dubbed “the one from Twitter” in the last talk of this week.
