A Return to Academia

I'm quickly approaching two months since I came home from my various travels. In that time, I've been applying to grad schools (a slow and arduous process), freaking out on a regular schedule of give or take once a week, and taking a few classes at my old alma mater, Wabash College.

I've been auditing two classes that I hope will help me get into grad school, but that isn't the sole reason that I'm here. I'm taking Microeconomics because just about every graduate school seems to require it in order to even be considered for a Master's in International Affairs. That was the primary reason I joined the class, but as the semester has gone on, I find myself more and more interested by what I'm learning. It's not so much the graphs and the technical aspects of excel, those I actually barely understand at all. (That's what happens when you take two or three years away from a computer. Things like Excel begin to look even more foreign than when you left.) Instead, I'm more interested in the analytic aspects of economics. I love the calculus behind it. I love the attempt to understand people through their subconscious, everyday habits. My old days as a math team member are coming back to me in the calculus part of it. Back in the day, we went four years without a loss; we pretty much dominated. But economics is more than simply math. Sure it's a social science, but it's also a guide to philosophy and life. Why do people make the decisions that they make? Why does history show us some civilizations succeeding and taking on new technologies while others lag behind? A lot of the time it comes down to an economic argument. Individuals know where their best interests lie, and it helps to explain why the question I saw in development, "Why aren't you doing it our way?" is better asked, "Why do you do it your way?" It's a subtle distinction, but one that's important for understanding different cultures and realizing the adaptability and ingenuity that make humanity amazing. It's a way of looking at the world not through our own personal egoism, but of honestly questioning another person's beliefs to reinforce or change your own.

It's maybe a bit of a deep thought for a basic economics course, but I've found that now that I've been away from academia for a bit, I'm more interested in why we study what we study. I'm taking another class about ethnic conflict and genocide, and because of my intense interest, I just pour myself into the readings. I've noticed though that other students don't. In both classes I'm taking, students fall asleep, don't do the reading, or don't try to fully understand why we're studying what we're studying.

I wonder if I was like this as a student. When I attended Wabash, I occasionally skipped readings, and I'm sure I fell asleep in a class or two. I didn't know how any of this knowledge was going to affect me outside of my own personal growth, and let's face it, personal growth can sometimes take a back seat during a reading of Aristotle. I had no clue what I wanted to do after I finished my undergraduate degree. I was there because it was expected of me. It's nearly impossible to find a job without a degree anymore, and in this increased demand for a degree of any kind, undergraduate education has become sort of like a continuation of secondary school. Sure you're a little more specialized, but you don't have any real idea why you're there other than to keep your "future" on track.

Now that I have a very clear idea of what I want to do, I am so much more focused in class than I have ever been at any other time of my life. I came into the semester four weeks behind the other students. In that time I had a lot of catching up to do, and I did it. It took me a solid week to get through all the readings in Ethnic Conflict, which is taught as a high-level political science course. In those first few weeks, I was basically teaching myself Microeconomics from a book, but I'm pretty sure I got most of it down. But what surprises me is that hardly any of the other students seem to have the same focus. I've been quite confused at times when a class suddenly seems to double in the few days running up to a major test. Where were all these other people, and why haven't they been coming to class?

I don't mean to make Wabash sound like the students are just completely uninvolved or lazy. They aren't. Wabash men make some of the most insightful points and ask some of the best questions I've ever heard from a kid born after 1990 (which is still kind of freaking me out, thinking about that age gap). But like students everywhere, they beg for extra credit, complain that something "wasn't on the study guide for the test," or whine that "there's too much work." I find myself on the side of the professor in all of these complaints. The reading is right there, you have it in your hands. The test isn't trying to trick you, it's just there to assess how much you've been paying attention. If you've read the articles and are interested in the material, your only complaint should be that you had so much more to say in a limited amount of time.

I guess I've got it pretty easy though as an older student. Now that I know what I want to do, what I want to study, and most importantly, why I want to learn what I want to learn, it makes it much easier to buckle down and get to it. I'm interested in what I'm learning. Even if a class is boring, I know that I'll need that information to make some other bigger step in the future. But so many of these students aren't like that. I know I wasn't back then. Maybe part of the reason that young adults seem to need a new age category, something between adolescence and adulthood, is that continued education has become almost a requirement at this stage of American development. A student is often shuttled from high school directly to undergraduate without any real-life experience. Uplifted from his/her parent's house to a dorm, a student doesn't have any better idea of how the world works or what they want their place to be within it. I guess I'm now a proponent of taking a gap year like so many Europeans do, taking time off to gain some experience or travel a bit, see and do new things. I wish I had taken one, but in retrospect, attending a liberal arts college like Wabash didn't hurt too much. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so why not get a little taste of everything? But I was a kid. I'd never even held a real job. It doesn't seem like we really enter adulthood until we start to have real responsibilities, and we don't get those until we finish undergrad, and by then, we're saddled with thousands of dollars of debt and little idea of what happens next. We've been taken care of and sheltered by institutions for our entire lives. Maybe it's time to stop asking young adults to act like their parents if we aren't ever going to expose them to the realities and responsibilities the world asks of it's citizens.