A friend of mine picked Davidson to go all the way in his tournament bracket, and so far, he's doing pretty well. His pick was made on the basis that "they seem like a rags-to-riches-type team" and that we have two friends named David. He does not read sports blogs or info-sites or whatever it is the modern sporting enthusiast does for his statistics fix. This is marginally relevant to my column this week.
Sitting in a particularly undesirable class last week, watching the sun splash its rays all over the Central Virginia countryside instead of examining the inane terms and diagrams the professor was scrawling on the blackboard, a thought occurred to me, as it often does. Well, more a question that a thought. What am I doing here? Let's explore this.
College, for all intents and purposes, is something people use as a stepping stone to better things. Sure, you could stop your official education after four or even two years of high school. But the thinking is that the more time you spend learning, the more educated you become and thus the more rewarding and higher-paying job you will eventually acquire. Right?
Fine, that's a rather stark interpretation, but think about people who didn't go to college, opting instead to immediately enter the workforce. They had to start at the bottom of the ladder, while we get something of a head start. And let's be honest: Doesn't someone with a diploma on the wall signifying he was in school for eight years more than he had to be command more respect than someone who went straight to employment? That's what I was brought up to believe and what I think we're all supposed to believe.
College graduates are supposed to be smarter, too. Or is it more intelligent? I always get those two confused. I suppose I do feel more intellectually charged than I did four years ago, but I'm not sure it has the slightest bit to do with the papers I wrote or the tests I took. If I make a better impression on a potential hirer than the next guy, it won't be because of my GPA. It'll be that I present myself as an engaging conversationalist, perhaps witty, perhaps challenging, perhaps slightly enigmatic, but in an erudite manner, not a psychotic one.
So how would one develop such traits and skills through the college experience if not in the classroom? Well, we're social animals, damn it! Academically, the closest to social interactions we get is small talk with the teacher before class (which is all too often the smallest of small talk), or maybe uniting under the common banner of whining about the class/professor while working on a group project (which is a bit closer to real communication). Discussion of a movie, food, book or party with friends is more or less always classified as leisure. And if you're just shooting the schmidt with your pals, then maybe it deserves to be. But I like to think my friends and I hold each other to high standards in the field of conversation. Absolutely, that makes us nerds/dorks/geeks to the highest degree, but I promise you that it beats school.
Of course, this isn't universally applicable. I wouldn't trust a doctor who didn't do well on his organic chem exams or a lawyer who wasn't familiar with jurisprudence, but very frequently you learn to do your job during the first few months of employment, not at school. So then, what matters is how well you can be a human being until you get there, not your irrelevant thesis.
I'm getting pretty hungry so I am going to get David to buy me a hamburger because he owes me $4, but before I do, here's essentially my point:
Maybe it is not perfectly right to be either a complete bookworm or a complete slacker if you want to change or save the world, but we will all have to deal with people, good and bad, our entire lives. It's in our nature, even if more and more of our interactions take place passive-aggressively online. As much as this sounds like me rationalizing not doing my homework, the fact is that I wasn't going to do it anyway. In the past I've been judged by how I present myself socially first and by my pertinent skills/accomplishments second. Maybe it's not right, but that's how it is. Welcome to Homo sapiens sapiens. You're here for life.
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