Discovering college, and myself

College, at its best, is where the individual grows up. It presents myriad choices, not just in ends to strive for, but also in the very means towards them. However, beyond all that, it is the freedom in spirit and surrounding to pursue the ideas that most appeal and the enterprise and motivation to build a satisfying career out of it that makes a university more than just a collection of students and scholars. Over much of the last decade of my life in college, I have metamorphosed, but not as much in a series of transformative steps as in a continuing response to a single major step.

The college experience has meant many different things to me at many different times. At one time it was just about stepping out of the shade of my parents’ roof or a continuation of the yearly routine of progression in grade numbers in high school. For a long time, it was a ramp onto the enticing freeway of scientific research and nearly a decade after, it is finally a place where I think I am finding what I want to do with this whole business of existence.

Finishing high school in small town India, college wasn’t as much the best place to nurture my talents and begin to build what would be my career as it was what unofficial conditioning from the family’s expectations and the official patchwork of entrance exams deemed me to be right for. And so I went, to a college not far from home, merging left and motivated to stay in the passing lane.

I found a focused engineering curriculum with a narrow track to graduation. There wasn’t to be much deviation from the predestined narrative. Surrounded as I was only by other engineers, it seemed like a blessing- a journey just of acceleration and passing, with none of the sudden brakes of a regular university’s non-major requirements. All around me, the best minds I knew were turning to the technology schools. It was a simple contract; work hard to stay to the middle and you’re more likely to be among the few who will take flight- the chosen few in an India where the old ways of relative social justice were being tossed over for boundless opportunities that personal enterprise brought, but only to those so equipped.

Nearly 5 years after my days as an undergraduate, I seek and find something else from college now. I chose a grad program pursuing much the same desires as what I did leaving high school. It was a few exits ahead, but a more enticing prospect. However, the eventual fulfillment of that desire is rendered something else by how different it means to me now. I reckoned grad school would take the adjusting that was to be expected when moving between places as far apart in my imagination as India and America- to the differences in climate, language and the unstated rules of engagement that societies imposed to make sense of themselves. Still, solace was expected in my studies, because nature and the physical world passed through unchanged whatever cultural lens I peered through. Well, I was right about how nature would be different from culture, but not about how I would react to it.

While the broad sameness of my academic pursuits grounded, the discovery of a multi-disciplinary university excited me. At the cost of diluting my focus, I dabbled in linguistics and history, evolution and anthropology. Although I never signed up for any of these courses, the very presence of these varied disciplines and their seminars and scholars in close proximity inspired me to learn beyond what I could see as part of my shortest path. I don’t think it is the knowledge itself that I have to show for it all, but what it has done to my character and my sense of self. I went from learning mostly for the sake of what it made me to being mostly what I learned.

The strict focus of my undergraduate years, ironically, did help support my wanderings later in grad school. Although academically, I have indeed stuck to the script of increasing specialization with time, my sense of what learning means to a meaningful life has both sharpened and widened. Once off the freeway, the criss-crossing network of roads makes for slower going, but the choice then also includes new routes and the experiences they bring. The more of them that is tried, the longer the whole endeavour may be, but the richer is the experience and broader the eventual perspective that is achieved.

Even with the privilege of hindsight, there isn’t any incident in the early days of grad school that I can see as having changed me. But the lack of a maximal point where in a moment, thoughts refitted into a new understanding, is mitigated most surely by the clarity of the difference in my states of mind then and now. In a way, it is fitting that an experience which owes so much to an appreciation of the emergent knowledge arising of seemingly disparate pursuits comes out as a continuum.

Today, inevitable realignments in the world economy make it more important than ever to produce graduates who seamlessly blend into the requirements of the workplace. To this end, the case for focused centres of learning aimed at solving society’s great problems is increasingly persuasive. They have obvious merits but, while seeking to sustain the complexities of modern life, their very focus blurs progress on an understanding of whether we are indeed headed where we want to go. An open search, on the other hand, is rewarding simply due to the pleasure it finds in the experience itself. From my college life hitherto, I am sure that in whatever way we choose to fine tune higher education, this open exploration of seemingly unfruitful ideas should also continue to hold a valuable place in the system.