I can remember sitting in a house in Georgia somewhere... It was 1988 or 89. I was at my then-girfriend's house. Her stepfather was a former pastor... how he became a former pastor is another thing, but anyway.
I was in Bible college- I was 19 going on 20, convinced I was going to be a youth pastor for life.
When he asked me if I was ever going to seminary I just laughed.
"Seminary?" I asked. "What would I need that for?"
I was convinced that I was going to be a youth pastor and that seminary was pretty much the farthest thing from helpful in what I wanted to do...

On the other side of Seminary (MA in Exegetical Theology, '97 and about 90% of an MA in Counseling), I tend to think differently. Yeah, there were times when I was in Seminary, and shortly thereafter when it was difficult to see... But now?

Here's a word from Will Willimon. Man, I love this guy...

"Scarcely two years out of Seminary I was amazed at how impractical many of my courses in so-called practical theology actually were. My course in church administration had taught me how to build a new sanctuary, which I've never had the opportunity to do. My semester on United Methodist polity was rendered irrelevant by two weeks of legislation at General Conference.
On the other hand, boring old church history proved to be shockingly practical. I faced a congregation of people who thought they were Georgian Methodists but who were actually Hindus, Buddhists, pantheists, Docetists, or followers of some other heresies and religions that even Roland Bainton had never heard of. Though I didn't feel compelled to tell them that the church had tried their theology back in the fourth century and had found it wanting, it made all the difference to me to be able to name their theologies."

And then this

"A friend who is now a full-time pastoral counselor used to make fun of my interest in reading theology. In seminary, he was all Carl Rogers to my John Wesley. The other day we had a long, rather surprising conversation about Barth's view of revelation and experience.

'What is this?' I asked. 'I thought you believed theology began and ended with Carl Rogers.'

'That was yesterday,' he replied. 'When I was in my twenties setting out to make people well, I had no need of such abstraction. Today it's different.

I asked him what was different.

'When you listen to the expression of raw human need, eight hours a day, five days a week, you need something beyond the practical. You need something to keep you from drowning. You need some means of transcending others' pleas for help and your own desire to be helpful.'"

No, I don't think you'll find that most of the information you pick up in Seminary will be helpful in ministry. But the person you become, largely because of wrestling through that information... Much of what I learned in Seminary has taken years to take root, to begin to change me in real, practical ways.