Ball State

» consolidation of debt

By China at 7:23 AM

I am a pharmacy major. That means I have spent the last 2 years of my life slaving over chemistry labs and studying about atoms and memorizing the periodic table. Then my junior year came around and I decided that I needed a minor. I went back and forth between Spanish and business and then finally after talking o my dad I decided I could always put bilingual on my resume, but I needed to have a background in business (almost everyone does now a days). So this year I signed up for a few business classes. One of them includes a personal financial planning class. I will be the first to say (with our first exam coming up very soon) that out of all of my 400 level chemistry and genetics classes my financial planning 110 class is by far the hardest for me.

I am really good with money. My dad has always taught me to save and taught me the significance of budgeting so I figured this class would be a walk in the park. Boy was I wrong. We are learning things like debt consolidation and interest rates, things I have no clue about. Being in that 50 minute class makes me yearn for my 3 hours chemistry lab. Everyone in my class is a business major or minor and seems to know significantly more about the subject than I do. I thought going in that I had a great handle on finances (hey I have a checking and saving account with real money in them) so how hard could this class be? Hard.

We have a project coming up soon that I have spent so much time on (I'm sure that everyone else in my class has it done already and finished in like 5 minutes). We have to choose a spouse and jobs for each and find our salaries and then continue to look for a house and find prices on a mortgage and interest and so on. Just hearing those terms make me sick. I called my dad for help and told him that instead of having to do this stuff on my own one day I'm just going to live with him forever. He just laughed at me and said you figure it out as you go along, everyone does. But if everyone does this in real life, how come it's so hard for me to do this imaginary assignment?