College and Pretense
I finally set into motion the last thing I need to commence my interview with the University of the Arts, and since my classes are mostly all winding up, I feel it’s time to conduct a postmortem on the stuff I’ve gone through this year. Needless to say, I didn’t experience the College Dream, because the College Dream is a lot of shit that they give you in high school to prevent anarchy. I lived parts of the College Dream, but they were the parts that, in all honesty, I wasn’t expecting to live.
The best part of college is the social life. That gets said again and again, but it’s not emphasized nearly enough. The classes are a pretense towards getting you living with people your own age, and the most important things you’ll learn are how you get along with people, what other people are like when you live with them all day long, and what people really think underneath the things they’re prompted to think in class.
I’ve learned that it’s really easy to like people if you want to. The first day, I was completely expecting to dislike my roommate. He seemed like the jock gym type. Turned out he was. Turned out that was a really good thing. Easily the most important thing I did all year was start to work out. All personal projects, all dreams and thoughts, pale before the stuff working out taught me. It made me a lot more honest about myself1 and in the process it made me more honest about others. If you avoid the sorts of people who spend their lives working with their bodies, if you devote yourself to the ivory tower aspects of the mind, if you tell yourself that what you look like doesn’t matter as much as what you think, you’re just as deluded as the people who tell themselves that being a strong person means they don’t have to think. You’re dealing with two parts of yourself, and neglecting either is a really bad thing, not just because it stops you from doing and feeling things you’d do and feel otherwise, but because you’re not being honest with yourself if you’re neglecting either side, and that makes you ignorant in a way that’s near impossible to overcome if you don’t bluntly face facts.
So that was the biggest part of this year. This sounds strange and a bit sad, but the best part of this year was looking at myself in the mirror and not feeling a little despair. People who go to the gym probably know that feeling existed before; people who don’t might say they don’t, but when your body is ugly you certainly know it, even when you tell yourself you don’t. And it’s not like I’ve made as much progress as I’d have liked, it’s not like suddenly I’ve got abs and a chiseled chest. It’s small things, like my stomach’s not looking like a beer belly, like my face slimming down a little bit. And the changes that these things have worked in me are fantastic and unbelievable. I’ve started passing up dessert in favor of vegetables and fruit, after years of prompting from parents that ended up having no effect on me, because one day last week it hit me that if I ate these things, it would actually help. There’s a lot of bullshit in the world, but advice about dieting is about as close to complete honesty as you can get.
That honesty also shows up in the people who practice it. This year I learned that I really love the kind of person who’s into working out and sports, because they’ve got an honesty that’s refreshing when you spend your time with artists and nerds, easily some of the most bitter people on the planet. (The good artists and nerds tend to be less bitter, but a good rule of thumb is that you’re not a good artist/nerd, no matter how much you think you are. I found out two years ago that I’d been deluding myself for quite a while before that, and while I’m making progress I know just how much farther I can go.)
It’s easy to lie to yourself, and everybody starts early. Trying to make yourself an honest person is harder than you think, especially because it’s so tempting to lie to yourself about your progress.
One of those lies have to deal with college education, which is by-and-large a crock of shit. Everybody in college knows it, and everybody in college lies to people who aren’t yet in college because their parents tell them to avoid criticizing college too much. People with degrees tend to defend the time it took them to get those degrees. The problem is that college does have a lot to teach you, but most of it isn’t the stuff you’d expect. In the Multimedia program, I deal with a lot of designers and journalists, and one thing that becomes apparent is that beyond the absolute basics, classes don’t teach you much. It’s not surprising if you think of how few kids improve their writing ability after, say, 6th grade, despite yearly classes teaching writing skills. Grade school lies by inventing the arbitrary rules that kill math and English for most people: things like outlined essays and draconian systems that all kids know won’t be used outside of grade school. College is a bit more honest in that teachers never pretend like they’re teaching you something useful if they’re not. In any event, most of the things that are most important to you you’ll have to learn on your own, and while college classes give you time to learn, that’s about all they’re providing.
That’s why the most honest college experiences tend to come through the sciences. I have friends in premed right now, and I have no doubt that they’re learning a lot of really useful stuff, because when you’re training to be a doctor or a scientist there are a lot of very basic things that are essential to your future career. I’d trust a journalist without a degree; I’d never trust a doctor without one. So your mileage will vary. But I’m writing this about the system I’m currently in, the system where I went for Multimedia because I have no interest in the sciences and I’d learned enough in high school to decide an English degree would be wasting my time.
If you’re going for one of those softer degrees, ignore the assholes who’ll tell you you’re not learning anything, even though they’re partly right. There’s one way to make them wrong, and that’s to make sure that you’re taking classes where there’s no way you won’t learn anything. My two least effective classes this semester were Design Perspectives and Creative Design. The two classes I took that taught me something were Basic Issues in Religion and Advanced Web Design, which I knew in advance was working with a language I’d never used before. Research your classes. Make sure that by the description alone you’re dealing with something you’ve never dealt with before. Anything that seems blurry and vague will most likely result in a vague and blurry class. If you’re in Multimedia, study animation and fine arts and composition and anything you haven’t already dabbled in, because the minute you get to a class where you already know things you’re just wasting your time and your money. (If you’re in Journalism, I don’t know what to tell you other than maybe “Stop”.) No matter what you do, remind yourself that the degree doesn’t matter. It’s just a piece of paper telling you that you’ve sat in classes. It doesn’t say you’ve learned anything or that you’ve done anything meaningful. Remind yourself that every teacher you’ve ever had had a degree in Education. Did you ever have a teacher that shat at teaching? That’s a teacher who spent four years being told a lot of shit that didn’t work. Good teachers aren’t good because of their degree.
There are people who make a career of bullshit and pretense, though. You might be one of them. Perhaps you want to go to a job that hires people because of good grade-point averages, and you’re fine with spending a long time learning corporate ladders and climbing up them. Perhaps you don’t care if you’re wasting money on a meaningless degree. In that case, you can disregard all this. I’m certain you’ll feel the same daily despair that I once did looking at my far-too-flabby body, and just as I learned this year, nobody is to blame but yourself.
Note that I’m explicitly not saying college is worthless, because it’s not. It’s just what you make of it. Some people learned things in the classes I snoozed through, because I started with some experience that they didn’t have. The bullshit I went through was bullshit with a purpose, and I’ve got entirely myself to blame for going through it anyway. The point I’m making is that you’ve got control over yourself and your life, and you’ve got to make the choices for yourself, because nobody else has an inkling of an idea as to what you need.
Myself, I’ve been thinking of becoming a guerilla student. My favorite teacher in high school advised me and a few friends of mine to do just that, in junior and senior year: “The stuff you’re doing,” he said, “doesn’t need a college degree. You’re going to sit in classes and waste your time doing things you don’t want to do, and you’ll think it’s meaningless, and it will be. And you’ll come out of school with nothing that’ll help you do anything, and you’ll be poorer for it. So don’t enroll. Audit the classes that you think will teach you things. Stay in the college system, because the people are what matter most. Don’t leave that entirely. Just don’t spend money on a goal that isn’t worth reaching.”
That line of thinking scares me a lot. It’s the line of thinking that says you’ve got to be confident enough that you’ll succeed, because you don’t have a backup that’ll get you a rung lower. It’s thinking that says you can’t bullshit yourself, because if you’re bullshitting, if you’re avoiding a degree not because it’s meaningless but because you don’t want to work, then you’re going to find yourself in a real shitty place in four years, and all the money you saved will be gone fast. And the temptation to bullshit is really strong, because a part of me wonders What if I don’t succeed? Wouldn’t I rather get a desk job than go through hell? And that temptation to take the comfortable road that means nothing is pretty damn strong.
But then I think about the job I had at the movie theater, the boring, easy job that one day I quit out of the blue because I couldn’t stand wasting my time on something meaningless. I think about the years I’ve spent racking up Bs and Cs in school when an extra hour of work a night would have given me valedictorian-level straight As. All the lectures I’ve had to face from teachers and parents because I refused to put time into things I didn’t think were worth time.
I think about the place I’m at now, which - I’m told again and again - some classmates really struggled to get into, the place that I call a shitheap that’s one of the three top public schools in the northeast of the United States. I think about the talks I have with friends who really love it here, who suggest pointedly that the problem isn’t college, it’s me. I think about my friend at Vassar who writes me saying that she’s just realized one of her classes was regurgitating shit, that she’s not sure if she’s taking classes that are putting her where she wants to be. I think about the people I know at Ivies who are dropping just as many hints of dissatisfaction as I am. I start wondering if the college really is the problem, or if the problem’s me.
I think about the people have met and the job I’ve got waiting for me this summer that I got on the strength of my resume alone - a resume I sent in without any mention of SAT score or grade point average.
I think about four years ago. I was writing a novel about flying pirates. On my fifteenth birthday I launched my first web site, Omega’s Eye, an ugly bloated site that got a nice handful of users before I broke the entire thing with a bad query. I’d written a total of one poem in my life, maybe two short stories. I was telling people I was working on cool things and those people were calling my bluffs.
I think about one year ago. I still hadn’t finished my novel, hadn’t directed a play, hadn’t ever written a thing online that other people found interesting, hadn’t designed any site that looked decent, hadn’t made anything I was really proud of. I was worrying about one final grade in school, because it hadn’t hit me that it was a grade nobody would ever look at, and I was in a fit of panic. I’d never been to a party, never set foot in a gym. I was a lot different a year ago.
Then I think about the three years ahead of me and realize just how much I’m going to grow in that time, just how many things I’ll be able to work on. And I wonder to myself just how many of the things I’ll be proud of will be parts of classwork, and how many things I work on for classes will be entirely ignored, stripped from my resume, because I won’t care enough to put effort into something that’s not really meant to succeed.
I’m still planning on transferring colleges, because I want to be in a city, I want to be around other aspiring artists, I want actors back in my life. But I’m looking at all the stuff I’m doing with a really critical eye. At some point in the last month I realized just how much is being wasted to put me in a place I don’t want to be, and I’m finally starting to think that the odds are with me if I leave the system and the pretense behind.
- If you think you’re overweight, and you have friends who tell you that you’re not, don’t believe them. Kindness sometimes gets in the way of honesty. Trust your doctor, especially if he has a chart listing percentiles.
Hey, this is brilliant, all the stuff about college is anyway. It puts all the thoughts I have had over the last 7 weeks of University into one concise statement. If you do somehow read this reblog rory, well done, you are right.
I think what you were trying to say is that, you have had enough of putting up with the bullshit, because it gets you know where and instead creates a self-perpetuating circle which just creates more bullshit which you have to put up with.
I am printing this off, and putting it on my wall, to stop myself from putting up with the bullshit, when I don’t have to. It’s My Life.
