Nearing Completion

I really needed to take a year off before I started college. Lord knows how hard I worked in high school to get into this one (snobbish like the rest) ivy league university and rejected from all the others I applied to. I took all honors classes, two and a half hours a of an evening program twice a week, volunteering on Sunday mornings at the community center, extracurriculars at school, and volunteering lots with the Sierra Club any other spare moment I had. Getting into a good school consumed my life, so I built my life around that one goal. Somehow in the process I forget to fully consider how much the process itself would consume me, and somehow I assumed that once I got into college all the hard work would be over and I could start to coast.

Ever was I wrong. I fully had the option to take some time off. No one would have sued me for it, and I would probably been better off for it, but nothing around me suggested that would even be an option worth considering. All my life I grew up with people politely smiling at me saying, "You're the type of kid who will go straight through to get a Ph.D." (If they only knew how many hours I was capable of wasting on MTV). Their words found a place in my self image. Besides, for some reason I always held an anxious jealousy towards those kids who managed to skip a grade and do fine. I felt like part of high school was kind of redundant and wished I was in that position (why waste those years of my life when I could get it over with quicker and move on?). College was my chance to keep with it. Taking a year off meant falling behind.

I came to school and the first year was roughly hell. I made some friends but not many good ones, by the end of the first semester I gave up on trying to go to dinner with people and started to eat alone every night. Going into the freshmen dining halls alone, where most people clump together like superglue, was one of the toughest things I had to learn to do. And then there were classes. I took premed biology and chemistry and some other things. Not only were those weed-killer intro courses lethal, I couldn't understand how so many students so willingly subjected themselves to mind-numbing lectures with mind-numbing professors. Outside of class people couldn't stop complaining but they all shut up and plugged their ears at the thought of trying to do something about it. The complacency and evasion drove me nuts.

Sophomore year was roughly hell, too. A few weeks into the first semester and I seriously considered dropping out. Instead, after a lot of thinking and some encouraging comments on my blog and from friends and family I decided to try to keep it together and graduate early instead. College, I began to realize, wasn't much more than a dead end. A golden path leading nowhere.

Then in my spring semester, I read an essay by Richard Rodriguez called "The Achievement of Desire." It was kind of a clunky title, and although I frowned slightly at its weirdness, I read on. He described the way he made it through Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley, and then while doing his post-doctorate in England came his reckoning. All these years of elite school, he realized, had so distanced him from his family, his culture, and his roots that he became overwhelmed with a desire to end his schooling and reclaim the very things his years of schooling took away from him. He left his post-doc program and finally, after many years, achieved what he truly needed and desired.

Reading his words, I saw a picture of myself projected into the future. Did I want to be that machine-driven motivated person who puts his education above all else and goes, goes, goes? Did I want to immerse the next decade of my life in the dusty elite institutions of America, internalizing a culture foreign to me and a culture that subordinates my family and my unique history? The "no" resounded in my head, and I finally found the articulation and justification I needed to come to terms with another option. Shaken weak by mounds of frustrating homework and hours at my two jobs after classes, I decided that I too need to put an end to this miserable education.

About a week ago I put in my application to graduate. Fighting the administration over early graduation has been a full-time job in and of itself. (They have almost $45K vested in keeping me here another year.) Nevertheless, this puts me one step closer to the end.

As I walked out of my meeting with my professor for our independent study course, I realized that I have finally gained what I needed from this education. I learned enough to begin to answer my itching questions about our burdened society: the true nature of our democracy, our ideal of equality and how it stands unresolved in our troublesome unequal reality, our institutions that were supposed to reform and yet left an unfulfilled promise to transform our society into that city upon a hill and our lives into an "American Dream." I've taken the classes, and done the reading to begin to understand and articulate the complex answers to these questions which have irritated me for years.

So my time spent here wasn't a complete waste. Now that I know, I feel more ready than ever to go. And if I ever come back... it'll be when I'm ready and when I want. No pressure over school books.