When I went back to undergrad after a 3 year break I felt different. I felt more entitled.

Entitled to a good education, yes, but more so entitled to the benefits that the University claimed to provide. I was viscerally aware of how much I was paying for school and was confused at the amount of bureaucratic work that was put on me.

Not only did I have to work full-time to pay for school, do the work for my classes, but also I had to run around campus collecting signatures and scheduling classes and finding a path through the university system.

My solution to this was often angry emails. Whenever something went wrong, I would send off a flurry of angry emails hoping to fix the problem. However, they rarely worked.

After a year of trying to fight it, I realized that often the response to my frustration was more frustration. The people receiving the emails were often just as burnt out as I was, and overwhelmingly not responsible for the problems that the university put in my hands. And even if they were, the best way to get my problem resolved was to instead write a sickeningly sweet email.

That was probably one of the biggest things I learned in my undergrad. If you must– write the angry email, but do not send it. Instead, kiss up.