You’re calling the shots: Who to
live with, which classes to take, and what to do with your free
time. There are 24 hours in a day, but you will only be in
class for about 2.4 hours a day. Who else has this much free
time? The unemployed, retired, incarcerated, or seriously
injured. Unless you wind up on academic probation, or play a
college sport, you get to decide how to spend all your free
time. This is a real glimpse into your
character, and the sort of person you are shaping up to be.
Of course, I hope you to have lots of fun, but I thought I’d share my
own reflections on college. Don’t worry, I won’t tell you to
follow your dreams or bring flip-flops for the shower.
Here are 3
things I’m glad I did in college:
1) I learned to use all that free
time to dive headfirst into lifelong hobbies.
I
convinced my roommate, who had been golfing since age 6, to teach me
how to golf. I remember thinking it was too late to start.
2 roommates down the hall had a Fender Stratocaster and a
Gibson Les Paul. When they were in class, I was
in their room trying to learn to play guitar. Fitness and
nutrition
became a lifestyle. All these things took dedication and
persistence, and many
years later, they are still part of my life (and still no
TV). The free time in college set the stage for lifelong
growth, exploration, and perpetually seeking out challenging
(therefore, authentically gratifying) pursuits.
2) I
took difficult classes. If you leave the
gym, and you’re not even sweating, then you didn’t really work
out. Your time and money are gone, but you’re not in any
better shape. In other words, do it right, or why
bother? Academically, I never tried to take the easy way
out. I wanted something to show for my 4 years of time and
tuition. Some people eschew the classes that are rumored to
be hard, and try to "game the system". Clever, yes.
But ultimately, I think you get out what you put
in. Some students would avoid a Friday 8am class just because
people went out on Thursday nights. Nice way to rule out a
major. You'll find there's plenty of time to hang out and take your classes seriously.
It is a choice to step up to the challenges of authentic rigor, and
experience the satisfaction pushing yourself to your academic
limit. I hope you discover a subject that intrigues you. Something that
you enjoy researching and thinking about. Something that transcends
the "Is it on the test?" mentality. If you finish school, and
you haven’t been driven to the brink of (intellectual) exhaustion, or
haven’t had at least a few frustrating moments, then you were
probably using too many of those cute pink 3 lb. dumbbells.
3) I lived in a 20 bedroom house
with 40 people. Everyone needs "alone time", but your communal living situation is the defining backdrop of your
college experience. Instead of seeking apartment isolation off campus,
I went to the other extreme, and immersed myself among people with
wildly different hometowns, work ethics, talents, majors, ambitions,
and personal interests. Naturally, there were smaller cliques
amidst the larger group, but at dinner, we all ate out of same giant
trough. At times, we shared ties, cars, CDs, class notes,
showers, and protein powder. When you live with people, you
are mainly judged on one thing: your character.
Well, that, and your personal hygiene. But certainly not your
car (or lack thereof), or your parent’s connections or wealth, or your
trendy clothing. As such, it was a very honest bond.
Today, we all have different lives and careers: journalists,
doctors, scientists, politicians, teachers, bankers, professors,
lawyers, accountants, business owners, technologists, and a
kleptomaniac. I wouldn’t otherwise meet or fraternize with
such an eclectic group today, so I value the enduring connections we
maintain.
Here are 3
things I regret about college:
1) I didn’t push myself out of my
comfort zone. I had a core group of friends, I
mainly studied alone,
and my extracurricular interests were not based
on large groups. Ipso facto, by junior year, I
didn’t socialize much outside of my established circle. If
you don’t mix
things up, you’ll tread the same old ground. Looking back, I should have
been more proactive in occasionally breaking away and finding some activities and events
that were out of my typical routine: Seeing an art exhibit,
attending a political lecture, going to a poetry reading, hearing the
university chamber choir, etc. Yea, I had little interest in
these things, but that is exactly how you can expose yourself to new
activities and new people (…while still maintaining your inner circle of
friends)
2)
I didn’t cut my hair for 2 whole years. It was
the grunge rock era. Most pictures have been destroyed.
3) I didn’t appreciate the
difference between "career preparation" and "being educated" (aka: "Go to a good college so you don’t end up in the
gutter!") Only in my 30s did I realize the purpose
of a college education is actually bifurcated: The duality of "Gestalt thinker"
(look it up…) vs. "credentialed worker". I totally
missed that first half. This complicates the definition of
what being "educated" even means today. It also introduces the
quandary of the working class student. Do you have to choose
between: 1) building an integrated perspective of the human
condition (History, psychology, sociology, philosophy, political
science, literature, foreign studies, arts, religion, music, etc) or 2)
narrowly approaching college as a "professional school" for the sake of
career skills and certification? (e.g.: healthcare, sciences, law,
finance, engineering, math, business, technology, accounting,
marketing, advertising, education, nursing, etc). I was too
young to see any value in the former, so I just loaded up on as many
Math, Computer Science, and Economics courses as possible because
"that’s what businesses want". I dismissed any humanities and
social science courses I was required to take as
superfluous since they were not "career preparation". Talk
about tunnel vision!
I don’t claim to have the answers, but
certainly won’t be a hypocrite. My "practical" majors
certainly yielded in-demand qualifications that opened the door for employment
in both of my careers, and this is just how I would do it
again. However, merely training for a career doesn’t necessarily mean you are wise or
learned. In fact, they are somewhat contradictory.
As I grew older, my gaps of knowledge became more apparent, and I
realized I never got a balanced education. Instead, my
college experience had gone a mile
deep and an inch wide. Today, most of my personal learning
now revolves around history, psychology, science, literature, and
philosophy. I regret not taking an interest in these areas
earlier in my life. They permeate
your world regardless of
how you make a living, and whether you "see" them or not.
If
I were back in college, I would find a way to still have my cake
(practical career oriented major) and eat it too (electives for
erudition, perspective, and cerebral cocktail party badinage).
Your major
is only about 12 of your total 36 classes, so there is lots of room for
exploration & enrichment. Further, it now just takes
an Internet connection or "$1.50 in late charges at your public library" and your five (count ‘em…five!) months of vacation to learn whatever
you choose independently. Quite frankly, college barely scratches the surface. If you truly want
to be educated (vs. "diploma-ed"), the onus is on you to become literate
in the various disciplines. This is no small order. Back in college, we all used to
joke about the "$80,000 piece of paper" and we’d ask, "Why do I need to
learn this to get a job?" Well, the simplest answer might have been, "You
don’t". Broad knowledge may just help you make sense of the world and people around you.
When I left the world of finance to teach High School, something funny
happened. People asked me what kind of drugs I was
taking. But, more importantly, people would share memories of
their own educational experiences.
Here is an email written by someone with whom I reconnected with at my
20th high school reunion:
I wasn't ready to start
my academic career at Clarkson. I was too busy playing soccer
and drinking. I guess that's another reason I want to go back
to school, since I am finally at that place in my life where I can
embrace learning. I was always lucky enough to be able to
skate by with not much preparation or studying, but it didn't really
make me that informed. I'm so ready now to throw myself into
it, but don't have the time or money. Life's cruel
joke. Youth really is wasted on the young. By the
way, I'm going to check out that book you mentioned from the library
today. I'm pretty excited, because I’ve been looking for a
good 'thinking' book for a while.
In contrast, here is an email written by another friend more than 15
years after we graduated college:
I still think it was the
best course I took there. It gave me the satisfaction of rising to a
difficult challenge, taught me that I could push out of my comfort zone
and accomplish something worthwhile, and gave me the discipline to
assimilate and distill massive amounts of information into something
coherent and intelligent. And, I still love Mozart's operas to this
day, and have almost instant recall whenever I hear part of one. (It's
amazing how often the Overture to the Marriage of Figaro shows up in
commercials, movies, etc.)
Wait. Did he say Mozart ?? Yea, that caught me off guard too. Perhaps you
can substitute Mozart with anything deep and rigorous? Navigating rigorous educational experiences subtly
change the fabric of your being. You may not notice it happening. You develop a humble respect for knowledge and
complexity. You understand what Socrates meant when he said, "All
I know is that I know nothing."
In college, you merely lay
the foundation and start down the path of becoming an informed, higher
functioning, integrated, and actualized person. That timeline
up top is just the start of your education: "Very
often, just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care
about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to
honor the mysteries of the world, you're kind of always willing to
probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something
you didn't know … and you can expect always to need to keep
probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong
inquiry.-JSB"1 Higher order
thinking, deep attention span, strong work
ethic, and quest for constant learning are not only job skills, but
life enhancers.
Being a full-time student is
a luxury, responsibility, and
profound opportunity. That won't hit you until it's long over,
and you're in a different stage of your life. I hope you
have a blast while making the most of it. If you
don’t, I guess there’s always graduate school.