Sometimes, I feel as if I am just going through the motions. So much of my Dartmouth experience has been about next steps deciding on how many majors to pursue, what graduate school to attend and so on. In many ways, as I look back on my time at Dartmouth to date, I feel like I have missed two years of my life.
By pragmatically spelling out my personal goals and planning precisely how to achieve them, I have not spared myself a minute in my overbooked schedule to think or reflect on my education. Perhaps even more importantly, I have not taken a moment to assess my own intellectual maturation, and how I was changing as a person through that process. In my calculated trajectory toward the next chapter of my life, I lost passion to practicality. In forgetting about education's ultimate purpose to transform and enlighten I certainly have just been going through the motions: riding a conveyer belt to a graduation stage, knowing that when I stood up in front of the thousands of people staring right back at me on the Green, my diploma would have honors stamped on it. But how important are those tangibles of our education the grades, the citations and the honors in the long haul?
Too often, as ambitious overachievers in today's meritocracy, we have overlooked the intangible of insight in favor of numbers. For instance, taking four classes at Dartmouth in a single term has become more indicative of success than fully investing oneself in three. Achieving straight A's in three layup courses earns a student more accolades than another student who finishes with less favorable grades in a much more personally challenging schedule. Could we blame the system of higher education itself for cornering students into this almost mindless pursuit of what is deemed the highest success? Sure, but it is never going to change. Merit equals success today more than ever.
I wish that I had heard this from someone much sooner than I came to realize it myself think below the grandeur. Instead of focusing in so closely on what comes next, whether it be Yale Law School, Harvard Medical School or an investment banking job at Morgan Stanley, spend some time in the present. There is no doubt that you are not exactly the same person, with the same interests, talents and friends, as you were the first day you set foot on campus. Where have your passions led you?
I am not here to say that enrolling in a class with a light workload or high median is a bad thing, or even sometimes necessary given the rest of your schedule. But choosing to take classes term and term again for the grade that will appear on your transcript rather than their intellectual attractiveness to you is choosing to go through the motions. The same can be said for activities beyond the classroom: extracurriculars, internships, volunteer hours and athletics. Time is priceless. We only have four years of undergraduate study to find what it is we love doing and develop an undying thirst to further pursue that passion post-Dartmouth. If we do not find an utmost joy in what we are doing, then why do we continue to beat on?
The mentality of finding happiness only after being admitted to the best graduate school or employed by the most prestigious corporation is an irrational one. What happens when we make it to the next level? Does the mindless pursuit of merit to achieve the "what's next" end? If the Dartmouth conveyer belt is any indication, post-grad life will not slow down afterwards as much as we would like to believe. So if we simply plod along with our eyes fixed on the future, we miss out on the best years of our young lives. Why? Because we looked past their importance.
