What are you doing next year?"
I am thinking about law school.
Cue polite approval from my acquaintance on the C-2. She has no way of knowing that my "plans" boil down to this semester's stream-of-consciousness rather than the agonizing months of dedication suffered by those actually on the professional track.
If my bus buddy happens to be a fellow second-semester senior, the conversation will take a more interesting turn. I will get the eyebrow. In touching instances, I may receive subtle concern or outright consolation.
This is because we are nearing February, and every senior knows that the time to be "thinking" is long past. Now is the time to be hauling butt or anxiously sitting on it in suspense of callbacks and acceptance letters. In short, our ultimate semester is the time to be reaping what we have spent our penultimate semester (or our entire lives, squeezed into 12-point font) sowing.
Sadly, it is difficult to reap what we have not sowed, which explains why I am not getting accepted to the schools to which I did not apply. I have not even taken the LSAT, which means law school next year is officially out.
And for the first time in my life, I am officially off-track.
I admit I did not plan it this way, but neither did I do much to avoid it-and by "it" I mean the unspeakable life fissure alluded to as the "gap year" by those on solid ground. A gap year is an odd choice for someone who takes great comfort in the superstructure that is the American education system. Not in the quality of it, but the inevitability built into it. First comes primary school, second comes secondary school. And for the lucky among us, neither preschool nor college was optional, which brings us to a grand total of 13 years body surfing from one river grate to the next. Of being safely channeled from one benevolent institution to another, ad universitas.
I report live from my perch on an unauthorized buoy. I've spent most of this year adrift, navigating pressing obligations and living vicariously through the successes of my friends and peers. Great jobs, fantastic fellowships, top law school offers abound all around. Meanwhile, I've remained unable to muster up terror on my own behalf.
It was only this past Thursday that I realized why.
On Thursday the Arts and Sciences Council unanimously approved the new undergraduate underload policy. As of Fall 2009, for two semesters, students will be able to take three classes and pursue anything from an unofficial start-up to a major campus publication as their undocumented fourth.
Assuming Duke could be described as an anthropomorphized voice, the move coheres with everything Duke has spent years telling us. There is no such thing as the ideal undergraduate career, set to preapproved music, stretched to fit some prototypal arc. The rationale behind the Arts and Sciences vote is more fundamental than the rationale behind Program II. Whether or not we choose to design our own majors, it is absolutely up to us to design our own college experience. And in a logical extension to all of this, at Duke we learn that after Duke, there is a certain possibility and promise attached to jumping off the wagon and carving the waiting abyss into a space all our own.
The past four years have changed my idea of what success looks like. Maybe you, too, are making it up as you go along. It's not the end of the world; it's the start of a long trek through it on your own terms. Our Duke education has gotten us to a marvelous place in our lives where we can be temporarily place-less, if we so choose, and not terrified.
I may be off-track and off my rocker, but right now, this just means that the perennial question, "where am I going?" has been completely superseded with its technical inferior and philosophical superior: "who am I?"
Thirteen years of "cultivating" this brain, and I am someone undisturbed by the fact that so far as I know, the only people interested in hiring me are interested in scanning it (and other healthy brains, age 18+) in exchange for handsome compensation.
No, I do not know what I will be doing next year or where on this earth I will be. I want to use my year "off" working my fingers to the bone and wearing my heart on my sleeve. If you have any suggestions, please forward them to me. My campus mailbox is still open. And for the next six months, so is the whole wide world.
Jane Chong is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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