Sense and Nonsense: The Grounded Student Explorer

Opinion by Aysha Bagchi
Sept. 24, 2010, 12:28 a.m.

Sense and Nonsense: The Grounded Student ExplorerOn a beautiful, sunny day this past summer (one that seemed made for an outdoor adventure), I visited the beach in San Francisco. As I was looking out over the Pacific Ocean, I was struck by a sense of the possibility so many must have felt over the past hundreds and even thousands of years when what lay beyond that vast expanse was a true and total mystery. Even to my modern self, simply thinking that undiscovered country (undiscovered, at least, by me!) lay beyond my sight seemed to infuse life with greater promise. It felt a bit like my first day at Stanford three years ago: possibility abounded in the fog of an undetermined four years.

 

College is a unique opportunity in life to broaden our perspectives, to let new experiences upend our views of the world, to reserve a few years in order to delve into unknown territories. We have at our fingertips so many different troves of knowledge, ways of thinking, opportunities to branch out on campus as well as experience more of the world. Yet this sort of exploration is, at least in the traditional sense, increasingly undervalued.

 

The formal exploration apparatus remains intact with such things as study-abroad opportunities, two years to choose our majors, breadth requirements and a hugely diverse set of options to explore. Yet students feel intense pressure to settle down, to focus, to excel in narrow areas. A fear of bad grades can keep us from other disciplines. Anticipation of the job market can turn us toward pre-professional tracks. Our desire for the esteem of those around us can push us toward specific targets that others have chosen for us. Even the University, in following immediate financial incentives, can nudge us toward paths in which we directly see how what we do is applied to a narrow aim. If college is a time of questioning and exploring, it is increasingly only on the most personal levels, with little relation to our public pursuits.

 

There are legitimate strengths to this modern trend. It reflects student acknowledgment of economic and family pressures, and a student population that is not sufficiently privileged to ignore them. And just imagine the seemingly self-indulgent attitude of a student whose life is entirely about journeying into the world with no tangible objectives in mind, whose aims in life amount to nothing beyond voyages for self-discovery. Her attitude is founded on the premise that she has no ties holding her down to the world, no fellow beings to take into account when directing her life course. She is aloof, perhaps even solipsistic. This is no foreign image: the traditional Princeton man of the 1950s who spent his college career “developing character” while not showing much concern for things that actually seem to matter in the world comes to mind. Today, students care about many things beyond themselves, and pursue them; and that’s progress.

 

Yet I want to push back against this modern trend, if only a few inches. A time for intellectual, artistic, social and personal exploration is so important for those who go on to try to benefit the world. Indeed, without this kind of discovery, we would foreclose every possibility we cannot see lying before us, would limit our futures to the specific objectives we already have in mind and the steps we have worked out to get us there. That is not the formula to be positive change-makers. Indeed, that is not the formula for any kind of fundamental change. Without learning to question those around us and ourselves, without developing the humility about our own beliefs that comes from exploration and discoveries that end up challenging them, we never develop the capacity to think independently, be self-critical and go against the grain.

 

Nor do we develop the kind of inner character that can sustain us through whatever we choose to pursue in the world. Take a simple example: many young people are going into public service today through programs such as Teach For America, but burning out a few years later and heading in another direction. They feel a tremendous—perhaps almost programmed—drive to help the world, but their college careers may not have been the recipes to develop the inner realms and self-understanding to sustain that energy over time. They may not have cultivated for themselves a soil that is deep enough to plant their seeds of discontent.

 

Perhaps this is the reason that, so often, the greatest achievers both in college and other realms are the ones who do not start out running. Rather, they start by slowing down and exploring, by leaving themselves open enough to be touched and transformed in ways they could not have foreseen. They are the ones who, without naivety or idle selfishness, view college as a time to discover and come into themselves. Call them the grounded student explorers; not only do they develop capacities to achieve great things, but they may also be more likely to look back on their college careers as ones they chose for themselves, and would choose again.

 

Explorers Unite! Send Aysha an e-mail at [email protected]. Who knows the possibilities that lie in store!

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