With Halloween just finished and winter fast approaching, it’s probably appropriate to spend a little time soberly contemplating one’s mortality. Or, if you’d rather not get so dramatic, you can meditate on the ever-shortening lifespan of your undergraduate career.
As a sophomore who spends most of his time with sophomores, and as a decorated veteran of a typically confusing freshman year, I can safely say that the nagging feeling that “time is running out” is not a phenomenon unique to upperclassmen. Take the phenomenon of “Bookbag Angst.”
For many of us who lack the good fortune to be able to map out our collegiate years with a bulletin board, notecards and tacks (you eternally lucky engineers, you), each semester’s book-bagging is an almost cinematic adventure.
After debating whether or not to don our dashing Indiana Jones fedoras, we dive into a world of courses ranging from the intros and surveys (Econ 51) to the arcane (Literature 151LS; Russian Fairy Tale) and try to grab hold of the most promising slate of four or—for the real action heroes among us—five classes. Some majors are more structured than others, moving students through a relatively clear progression of core courses and required classes. But no matter what, there’s always going to be some room for choice, and that can get complicated.
There’s really no way to attend an American university (even Brown) and somehow avoid the stress of having to actually pick specific courses to take during one’s academic career. Many courses, compelling as they might appear, will just have to be relegated to the “could’ve/would’ve/should’ve” pile. But there’s a difference between admitting the inherent difficulties of making a fairly substantive choice that affects one’s time—that’s reasonable stress—and that more insidious emotion: “Bookbag Angst.”
I can’t give a number to describe how common “Bookbag Angst” really is, but I’ve seen multiple instances among friends and acquaintances in which normal mulling and thinking through devolve into something like minor existential worry—a lighter version of what some long-dead Germans called “Sturm und Drang.”
It’s a mortality thing. We students pay a wholesome sum to attend our (future) alma mater dear, and it’s not at all unreasonable that we expect a number of things from our classroom “education.” Ideally, we’d like the classes we take to cumulatively satisfy our intellectual curiosity, teach us some demonstrable skills (i.e., writing, statistical analysis) and hone our more abstract thinking skills—the age-old justification for an, erm, liberal arts education. All that has to be done inside of eight short semesters—mortality.
Which begs the question: shouldn’t the process of picking exactly the right classes to teach us exactly the right things and serve exactly the right purpose be “that big of a deal”? Nah, not really.
Not that there’s anything wrong with carefully selecting what seem to be the most enriching/enlightening courses. But this idea of some fundamental educational mortality—that all the essential nuggets of learning are hidden in the vast labyrinth of four years of book-bagging classes, and that they must be sought with a sort of desperate focus—doesn’t stand much scrutiny.
An undergraduate liberal arts education (so I have to exclude you engineers again, you lucky dogs, you) was not conceived of and does not function as a one-time filling of an individual’s “knowledge tank.” We are not SUVs being pumped full of all the “knowledge”—concrete and abstract, left brain and right brain—that we’ll need to use until we eventually die.
What our education can do is provide a rarely exact, eclectic, multifariously challenging exposure to a smattering of ideas and a part of the body of general academic knowledge. And then we get to add to it and augment it and appropriate it for the rest of our lives. “Learning how to learn” may be a cliché, but it’s one of those annoyingly useful ones.
If you buy the idea that there’s value in a diverse liberal arts education, then you recognize that there is value in all sorts of study. Mrs. Ruland in the fifth grade was right; learning really is a life-long process, and anything that’s so essentially tied up in all aspects of living one’s life is bound to be too complex to plan for by mulling syllabi on ACES.
It’s a waste to spend too much time trying to predict not only what exactly, in all senses of the word, you will “learn” in a given class, but also what you “should” be learning. Angst about death, not your Bookbag: it’s more poetic, anyway.
Connor Southard is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Monday.