I slump my shoulders, sigh, and say, "I feel like I've taken a degree in social media complaining."

I see my instructor's ears perk up. I silently hope I'm not again called "defensive" by someone who has their paycheques signed by the school I pay to attend. He doesn't say a word.

On the walk from school to home we discuss the fourty-odd dollars we had just shelled out, only to have a graduate student pry into us with questions we've already heard.

The Internet? We're connected. Blogs? We have our own. Facebook, A Smaller World, Second Life, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Digg, Twitter. The list goes on. We get it. What we want to know: why are we pursuing a degree that reads like an RSS feed?

Are bloggers journalists? Will print survive? Is the blogosphere democratic? Is there a need for a code of ethics online?

Most of us don't care. Those are questions for ancient print masters and poorly paid journalism professors. For our generation of blogger-slash-journalists, who have always had the Internet and always will, there is only one answer to these questions. To quote Billy Corgan: definitely, maybe.

We've never thought of the media as stable, we weren't expecting to make much money and to us the Internet was never a "fad". YouTube must seem like revolutionary technology to 40-somethings who can explain the finer details of the printing press, but the school is missing something. New classes have never known a world without Friendster, HotorNot, Livejournal or ICQ. To sell the blogosphere back to students is like selling a fish water.

And eventually people will stop buying it. For now, we need that degree. Or, we think we do. As the elevator opens at my floor, my friend and I make a biting realization: had we gone to college, we would probably have jobs by now.

As I reach my front door I'm reminded of a class reading. On page fourty of The Elements of Journalism, Nightline's Ted Koppel is quoted, saying, "Journalism schools are an absolute and total waste of time."

Maybe, I have learned something at J-school after all.