Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
As I prepare to depart this university after four years, I find it necessary to impart some of what I learned along the way. They are merely words of advice and caution, lessons I learned too late but ones that might assist some of you in your remaining time here.
Initially, I was opposed to going to college. But under pressure from my school and family, I was carried by the same current that pushes many unprepared adolescents into its dry and unfamiliar atmosphere.
Much of my first month here was spent by the fountain on Mckeldin Mall. I knew no one and resisted making acquaintances. I insisted I would only temporarily surrender to this path, that I would leave as soon as I found the chance. Only that chance never came, and I remained here, like what was expected of me.
Despite my unwillingness to attend college, I performed well. No one suspected I didn’t want to be here or that I felt imprisoned in this rigid system of grades and overwhelming expectations. I worked very hard. And at the end of each year, when I would re-consider dropping out, I would think of all the work I put in and decide to go on once more.
But in our fervor to succeed in the extremely competitive arena of academics, we often neglect the most crucial aspects of our lives. I don’t just mean when we ignore our family and friends during times of immense work and pressure. I’m talking about when we neglect ourselves.
Too often we mute our opposition to the majors and jobs we never desired if we believe they’re necessary for our success. I mean somewhere along the way, subconsciously, we lay aside our individuality and embrace the conformity that is essential to thriving in this highly competitive capitalistic environment. We stop listening to our own opinions or following our dislikes because to do so is to resist the entire system we all live in.
This is the system: There are classes that must be taken, credits that must be completed and a GPA that must be maintained. There may be breaks, but they are not really breaks since you are still expected to partake in some sort of internship or job for your resume. It is a system that doesn’t pause and wait for anyone.
And along the way, our interests are reduced hobbies and minors as we make way for the major society has assigned greater value to. Many people I knew with immense talent in art and literature gave way to majors that hardly interested them because they had to make a choice between earning a living and doing what they desire as a living. Sometimes, it’s not in one’s ability to choose both.
Yet, I cannot insist that college is all conformity and rigidness. There are places within this university that have provided students with much needed refuge. There was, for instance, the Writer’s House, where I was granted an immense degree of freedom to craft whatever creative vision I desired. There have also been certain classes that made my painful university years very much worth it, strange classes that have challenged the traditional format of teaching.
I took a class on prison literature and another on global literature, which were taught by very daring professors who challenged and altered many things I knew about literature and life. These are the classes that you should seek in your time here. They are few, but they are there, waiting to change you and awaken some of your deepest passions.
In these four years, you will change considerably, despite your resistance to change. It will happen almost suddenly. One day you are a teenager eager about the world and the next you are an adult, worrying about grades, internships and all that comes after. It happens long before you graduate. It takes place some time between you leave home and when you begin gathering enough excuses for not visiting. It’s a transition necessary for one’s survival in college. It’s a mode of selfishness one adopts to temporarily ease the strain of college but can quickly become a permanent way of life. After all, college is mere preparation for the harsher demands of life that follow.
But we shouldn’t surrender to what has been charted for us. I graduate this May, for instance, with nothing formal prepared. I have no job or internship awaiting me, nothing which I have committed myself to besides a little freedom. And I am proud of this, despite the strange glances I receive when I respond to questions about my plans after college. Some assume this is a financial privilege. I have nothing of the sort. All I know is that after years of school followed by four years of college, one should be granted some time to explore life without any of its systems or demands. It’s important, every now and then, to taste life without the fetters of deadlines and stress that transform many of us into unfamiliar people.
Aiyah Sibay is a senior English major. She can be reached at AK_Sibay@hotmail.com.
