Thursday, September 02, 2004
Familiar
This scene is so familiar to me. It's very close to 1 a.m. and I just finished my homework. It's not because I had so much, I just didn't really want to do it, so I put it off a little too much. I had a really busy day actually. I guess it's my first busy day since I got here. Aside from my four classes, it was my first day at work. I'm going to work at the same place I did last year, teaching elementary school kids, but more on that later. After that I had to attend a reception for a special program in my university to which I was admitted this summer.
The program is called the college scholar program. Each year, the school admits 40 students who just finished their freshman year into this program. It's competitive, it requires some work (a proposal, letter of recommendation, and supporting materials), but it's so worth. I had been eyeing this program well before I ended high school, and I was lucky enough to have been admitted this summer. The perk is that for these 40 students, almost all graduation requirements are waived. No general eds, no distribution requirements. We're even waived from the requirement to declare a major. Aside from having to accrue a certain amount of credits and complete a project about a topic of our choice, we're pretty much free birds.
So tonight, all 40 of us got together along with our academic Dean and a couple of the faculty members on the board. We had the obligatory go-around, where every student had to say "1 sentence" about the project/field they're interested in. Of course I cheated, there's no way I can define myself or my interests in 1 sentence. I think I may have even muttered 3.
Anyway, maybe this is just me, but what struck me so much is that almost every student's project stayed very safely within the confines of "standard academia." Politics, government, international relations, human rights, agriculture, cultural studies, various philosophical theories, psychology, yada, yada, yada. Don't get me wrong. I'm not mocking these kids. They're super motivated, and dang smart. But with a chance like this to really break free, you'd thing they'd really push the envelope, be edgy, controversial, pose probing questions, investigate their very own lives...
So my turn came along, and well, I'm not that conventional, so the conventional academic fields that exist didn't help me (as much as they helped other students) to define my project in one sentence. I said that I want to study how society and all the systems associated with it (government, economics, education...) are changing with modernization. I want to focus on the effects this changing society is having on teenagers and college-aged students, particularly with regard to stress. The twist is, that I want to present my understandings in the form of creative non-fiction stories (as opposed to a research paper).
There you have it. My job description for the next couple years. I'm going to be knocking on your door and finding out why you're so tired, depressed, frustrated, stressed or unhappy. I'm going to be questioning the universities and seeing how much they care for their students versus how much they care for their endowments and prestige. I'm going to be turning and inquisitive eye on our political system to see how much our democracy is really about empowering people, and looking out for the common good. I'm going to be looking at how education and business is changing, how everything seems to become more and more competitive. All that stuff is only a backdrop to my real interest: what toll is this changing society having on us? What is the human price we pay for living the way we do?
The program is called the college scholar program. Each year, the school admits 40 students who just finished their freshman year into this program. It's competitive, it requires some work (a proposal, letter of recommendation, and supporting materials), but it's so worth. I had been eyeing this program well before I ended high school, and I was lucky enough to have been admitted this summer. The perk is that for these 40 students, almost all graduation requirements are waived. No general eds, no distribution requirements. We're even waived from the requirement to declare a major. Aside from having to accrue a certain amount of credits and complete a project about a topic of our choice, we're pretty much free birds.
So tonight, all 40 of us got together along with our academic Dean and a couple of the faculty members on the board. We had the obligatory go-around, where every student had to say "1 sentence" about the project/field they're interested in. Of course I cheated, there's no way I can define myself or my interests in 1 sentence. I think I may have even muttered 3.
Anyway, maybe this is just me, but what struck me so much is that almost every student's project stayed very safely within the confines of "standard academia." Politics, government, international relations, human rights, agriculture, cultural studies, various philosophical theories, psychology, yada, yada, yada. Don't get me wrong. I'm not mocking these kids. They're super motivated, and dang smart. But with a chance like this to really break free, you'd thing they'd really push the envelope, be edgy, controversial, pose probing questions, investigate their very own lives...
So my turn came along, and well, I'm not that conventional, so the conventional academic fields that exist didn't help me (as much as they helped other students) to define my project in one sentence. I said that I want to study how society and all the systems associated with it (government, economics, education...) are changing with modernization. I want to focus on the effects this changing society is having on teenagers and college-aged students, particularly with regard to stress. The twist is, that I want to present my understandings in the form of creative non-fiction stories (as opposed to a research paper).
There you have it. My job description for the next couple years. I'm going to be knocking on your door and finding out why you're so tired, depressed, frustrated, stressed or unhappy. I'm going to be questioning the universities and seeing how much they care for their students versus how much they care for their endowments and prestige. I'm going to be turning and inquisitive eye on our political system to see how much our democracy is really about empowering people, and looking out for the common good. I'm going to be looking at how education and business is changing, how everything seems to become more and more competitive. All that stuff is only a backdrop to my real interest: what toll is this changing society having on us? What is the human price we pay for living the way we do?
