Jimmy, you're a college student working towards a writing degree. I have been published for 60 years on 3 continents, and I started on the web in 1994 when it had just over 3000 sites. I started writing for money on it in 1999.

This is not a crappy way at all. While it's crappy for the majority of writers won't get accepted, I can assure you that Medium knows exactly what it is doing.

The program is to find specialists in particular topics who will write about something with expertise in order for search engines to find them.

Medium is not interested in developing writers. As I said, writers these days are two a penny.