This week feels final. As a graduating senior, I’ve been spending this semester waiting for some kind of clarity—expecting some parting sense of closure or greater purpose to find me in my last few weeks on campus.
It hasn’t. I suppose I still have finals left—and a week at Myrtle. But no one finds clarity at Myrtle.
When freshmen ask me how to navigate Duke, I really don’t know how to respond—except to regurgitate advice about ditching pre-med or “pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.” Those nuggets are always worth recycling for each new class of first-years.
But before an underclassman ever asked me for advice about Duke—and before I even knew to ask advice of upperclassmen—I remember hearing from my family and friends about what college was supposed to be all about.
College, they said, is where you go to find yourself.
“Find yourself in college.”
I really dislike that phrase. I’ve heard it a lot—so much so that it’s probably worth discussing for 800 words. Maybe I dislike it because it’s kitschy, overused, and unhelpful. Maybe it’s because I—or me, my soul, my destiny, whatever it is—is still out there, somewhere, probably in Perkins, waiting to be discovered, and I’m just anxious because I haven’t found it yet.
But I don’t think so. I think the age-old adage is wrong. And I think it’s wrong in a couple of important ways.
First, there is a difference between finding yourself and searching yourself. My guess is that we use the word “find” because “searching” implies that we know what we’re looking for.
Thinking back, there were a number of things I stumbled upon at Duke—perspectives, ideas, beliefs. Most of the time, when I stumble upon a belief —when I find and adopt something rather than create something myself—I wind up with something either shallow or wrong. Some of those ideas wound up in this column—both before and after edits.
“Finding yourself”—wandering without intentionality—usually doesn’t work well here. Our culture is one that pulls. It pulls toward certain peer groups, certain academic paths, certain careers. It pulls in ways that are nonrandom and not always ideal, particularly for the wanderer. For better or worse, Duke is not a place where people are usually found. It is a place that steers—steers into peer groups of comfort rather than challenge, into activities of continuity rather than fulfillment, into paths of achievement rather than purpose. None of this is unique to Duke. Most of it is tied to the culture of a place where talent and opportunities and expectations intersect. But whatever it is—it is not usually for the wanderer.
Duke, and I think college generally, is a place where we should search for ourselves—a place for active pursuit of who we want to be and what we think is important.
Maybe it would have been a lot to expect 18-year-old me to know what I was looking for. But maybe not. Good friends who think differently. Academics that inspire. Activities that give energy and joy. Intentionality that lends itself to purposeful direction.
An implicit assumption in that advice is that there is only one self to find—a singular, best version. I’m skeptical of that. And I hope (dear God) that discovery doesn’t end with college.
But the second fundamental reason why I dislike that phrase has less to do with the ways Duke pushes around those without intentionality, and more to do with how hard it can be to move once we do, in fact, “find” something. It has to do with how we root out inconsistencies—maybe even how we root out hypocrisy.
There are good reasons to strive for consistency—in whatever form it may take. And there are good reasons why hypocrisy doesn’t serve us well. When we find ourselves somewhere uncomfortable, our temptation is not always to search for something else, but to reorient ourselves to avoid the discomfort. To shirk the feeling, not the activity. But hypocrisy is more than uncomfortable. It’s also stigmatized. At Duke, we love to justify—no matter how honest we know those justifications to be.
Many of us, myself included, came to Duke with a plan for how to better our own corner of the world. We brought a passion or an interest or a favorite subject. We brought a plan to change something for the better. And over time, as graduation creeped ever closer, for one reason or another, we choose not to. Most times, that takes the form of something mundane. But sometimes it’s more defining.
And this time of year, it most obviously manifests in career choice. It isn’t only that we opted for consulting or finance when didn’t need to—or even when we didn’t particularly want to. Rather, it manifests when we justify.
Maybe, if I were a better person or had more conviction or had “found myself” just a few more weeks before Econ 101, I wouldn’t have opted for the same. Maybe I wouldn’t have signed up for management consulting recruiting or the LSAT. But maybe there’s something valuable about embracing the inconsistency—about naming the pulls that operate on each of us.
Duke can pull hard. I think there’s something compelling—maybe even noble—about acknowledging that pull. More importantly, I think there’s something hopeful about it.
For the searcher—for those who come to this place with intentionality, tolerance for inconsistency, a healthy self-consciousness—Duke can be transformative.
I’m leaving campus in a few weeks, and I still haven’t found myself. But I know what I’m searching for. And I think that’s a pretty good start.
Tanner Lockhead is a Trinity Senior. His column, "not straight talk," runs on alternate Mondays.
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