The Freshman
The lie of the tight-knit community
Why living in residence might not be worth $10,000 a year
When I was finishing high school, my biggest priority in choosing a university was to get out of the house and experience life in residence. Various pundits of higher education, family, friends, teachers, and counsellors, all touted the importance of experiencing that aspect of university life. You will learn as much outside of the classroom as inside of it, they insisted, provided you leave home and live in residence. Craving the perceived independence, freedom, and the idea of living down the hall from my entire group of friends in a “tight-knit community,” I swallowed their arguments whole and shipped off to Toronto.
Having now lived it, I am somewhat less enthusiastic about the value of moving away for university. In very tangible terms, I don’t think the benefits of living in residence are worth the $10,000 a year that pay the average university’s fees for room and board. Of course, I had some great times living in residence at U of T this past year. There were great parties, incessant socializing, and the comfort and convenience of not having to cook or clean.
But there were equally great parties living at home during high school, and my non-res friends at U of T can come down to campus whenever they feel like. Relative freedom from cooking and cleaning also likely exists for most of us at home. And incessant socializing, it turns out, gets old pretty fast, and can be a huge drain on one’s productivity and motivation to trying new activities rather than just chillin’ in the quad with the same dozen acquaintances.
An emphasis on the distinction between acquaintanceship and friendship is important. I think it’s fair to say that most of us enjoy real friendship with a handful of people, and that beyond that, social groups tend to consist of mere acquaintances–people with whom you are friendly, but don’t share the same depth of connection as you do with a real friend. Life in residence immerses you among acquaintances, which can certainly have its benefits in terms of honing social skills, becoming more open and accepting of differences, and so on. But it is likely mistaken to assume that living in residence will provide you with an instant, enormous, “tight-knit” network of friends.
Like in high school, people will always have their differences, and cliques still exist. The benefits of immersion into university life, such as the oft-cited creation of a “tight-knit” community, deserve to be scrutinized before you (or your parents) drop $40,000 or more over the course of your undergrad.
The Information Flood
Too much to do? Ditch the laptop.
I’m done with school for the year, but my work load is just as heavy as it ever was. At home, with no obligations and the internet at my fingertips, I find myself sucked into its murky depths for hours on end; reading about the dramatic British election, the publishing executive who provided the basis for Sex and the City’s Mr. Big (a guilty pleasure), an inspiring commencement address by Steve Jobs, the incredible speed and efficiency of the FBI in tracking down amateur terrorists, Iran’s nuclear antics… the list time-consumingly stretches on.
Then there are the psychology magazines I bought for my flight home but haven’t gotten around to reading yet, the stack of philosophy books and novels I’d like to get around to this summer, a foreign language to maintain and another to learn, a musical instrument to re-familiarize myself with, daily news to keep up with internationally, domestically, locally, friends and family to see, and so on. Of course, these tasks are joyously low-burden compared to the high pressure workload of university, but they demand time and energy nonetheless. On a micro scale, these incessant distractions are indicative of the information flood.
The above link is to a special report in The Economist, which examines the explosion of data creation in the age of cheap cell phones and cameras producing mountains of information alongside massive telescopes and Large Hadron Colliders, which alone creates 40,000 gigabytes of data each second. All that data creation far outpaces our ability to store it, let alone classify and analyze it. The result is a society struggling to keep up: the data management industry is now worth $100 billion and growing at 10 per cent a year; universities from McGill to Berkeley have created dedicated Schools of Information; Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and data scientists are becoming more prominent in business.
This information flood on a societal scale trickles down to the individual too, who, faced with far too much information to take in and too many demands on his time, is forced to somehow choose to focus on that which he finds salient. Once that decision is made, and information is encoded into memory, the task of analysis must begin, sorting through the masses of newly acquired information and identifying trends, patterns, lessons.
The difficulty is of course amplified by the internet, a fact which has led some of my perhaps more intelligent friends to take drastic measures. Realizing that the university’s wireless internet didn’t reach his dorm room, one friend decided to literally cut his ethernet cable in half, forcing himself to go to the library to use the internet and opening up vast swathes of time in which to read books, have face to face conversations, and otherwise focus his time and attention much more effectively. Another friend, who is moving out next year, is leaving his laptop at home altogether, convinced that the benefits to his time and focus are more valuable than the aimless wading through the information flood. If direction and focus is lacking in your own attempts to negotiate the deluge, perhaps such action is indeed worth considering.
You’re hired, Johnny!
Summer jobs, nepotism, and other unfair discrimination.
First year has finished, too quickly for comfort, and the search for a decent summer job is by now long over for those smart enough to have begun it back in January. Those who have left it to the last minute are likely destined for pizza places and dish pits. Unless, of course, one is lucky enough to reap the rewards of nepotism, that power of connection that lands the otherwise unspectacular candidates coveted internships and other plum positions.
My own summer job is at least partially the result of a personal connection, as are the jobs of many of my friends. To find summer work in the Federal Department of Justice or at Canada’s High Commission to the UK, to name a couple examples, is next to impossible for the average 18-year-old first-year student without personal connections.
Is it fair that someone who, completely by chance, is born to a powerful family, should be afforded more opportunities than someone who is born to poor parents? Even if it isn’t fair, is it even possible to overcome, to control, to enforce equality over nepotism?
On a grander scale than the student summer job market, recent conversations with some of my more socially conscious peers have illuminated the deeply entrenched and often subconscious nature of unfair discrimination in our society.
For instance, one study, which followed more than 300 participants throughout their lives from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, found that “attractive adults are more able to procure aid from bystanders, they often have greater social influence, and they are favored in the job market and in the criminal justice system.” Once hired, attractive men and women have also been found to make more money, while income inequality between men and women is a well-known problem of discrimination.
Systematic discrimination against immigrants is another well-known phenomenon. One survey focusing on the experience of Latin American MBA graduates in the Canadian job market found that “75 percent of the respondents referred either to a general and unspecified sense of differential treatment due to not being Canadian or to the perception of different treatment based on accents or lack of Canadian experience.” Of course, discrimination against Hispanics in the United States is much more explicit, as demonstrated by the recent conviction of a 19-year-old Rhode Island man who killed an Ecuadorian immigrant while engaging in the widespread activity of “Mexican hopping,” which is essentially hunting for Hispanics to assault.
A University of Toronto economist found further support for the trend of discrimination in hiring processes when he sent out more than 6,000 resumes to Toronto-area employers. On some resumes, he changed the last name to an Asian sounding name and left all the qualifications the same. He found that resumes with non-Asian sounding names were 40 per cent more likely to be called in for an interview.
Such are the challenges facing pretty much everyone except good-looking white guys, apparently. Reaping the sweet fruits of nepotism is one easy way for us summer job seekers to help perpetuate the various unfair forms of discrimination upon which our society is built. See what a cynic first-year has made me?
Hidden secrets of academic success
What you can’t see might hurt you.
While conscious efforts to maximize the quantity and quality of studying may indeed be important to meeting your full academic potential, there are many factors that influence academic success beyond your immediate awareness. Two such factors are perhaps especially relevant during this time of year as exams approach and as soon-to-be former freshmen choose roommates to live with next year.
The first is known as encoding specificity. Firmly established by Canadian neuroscientist Endel Tulving, this phenomenon states that recalling previously learned information will be most effective when the context in which you learned it is replicated. Thus, students who write a test in a room very different to the room in which they learned the information (or studied it), will do worse on the test than if the rooms were similar.
Encoding specificity can also be important in mental states, with research even showing that information learned while drunk can be better recalled when drunk! While it probably isn’t a good idea to study and write your finals while inebriated, the principle is more practically applicable by realizing that even just imagining the context in which you learned something can help you recall it. A good review of some research into this phenomenon can be found here.
A second influence on your academic success that may remain beyond your awareness is your roommate. Working with freshmen at Darthmouth College, where students are randomly assigned roommates, economist Bruce Sacerdote found that students’ GPAs were significantly influenced by the GPA of their roommates (see the report for all the glorious mathematical details). While planning who to live with next year, it is advisable to choose smart people.
And thus continues the unrelenting struggle to balance future concerns (academic success) with more immediate pleasure (living with/near more carefree and fun loving friends), all the while keeping an eye on those influences that aren’t as immediately apparent… such is the nature of university life.
The blind leading the blind
Self-definition and compromise in the choppy seas of first year.
Before I began first year, I wrote about the difficulty of “being yourself,” illustrated by decades of psychological research showing how willing people are to conform to a group–when they can obviously see that the group is wrong. Now, as I conclude first year, this idea is worth revisiting. The balancing act on display throughout this past year in pursuit of self-definition in the face of powerful social influences has indeed yielded some interesting results.
The phenomenon that psychologists call the ‘affiliation motive,’ a formal way of referring to the need human beings have to engage in meaningful relationships, seems a particularly powerful force in shaping a person’s behavior–perhaps even more so for those often insecure creatures of transitional identities called adolescents. For them, premising behaviors and beliefs upon a desire to fit in, to be accepted, or to achieve other aspects of the affiliation motive, can lead to outcomes of dubious value.
Meeting the criteria of the affiliation motive is not always congruous with meeting the criteria of other aspects of one’s life. Much social interaction therefore seems premised upon compromise – upon altering one’s more fundamental, perhaps ‘primal’ motivations and concerns (the id, say) in favor of socially constructed concerns and motivations (the so-called superego). In so doing, I think that one chooses to sacrifice a degree of personal autonomy, allowing some other person to take a measure of control over one’s life and development.
In some cases (family, close friends, etc.) it might well be true that the person in question can indeed provide perspective and advice that is in your ‘best interest,’ however that interest is defined (at the very least, hopefully it’s defined by you). But to premise one’s behaviors and motivations upon the often whimsical values of other 19 year olds seems to be nothing more than the blind leading the blind.
The crux lies, perhaps, in choice. Should one consciously and knowingly choose to submit autonomy to an external motivator (a friend, a university, a parent . . .), perhaps this represents a civilized achievement in pursuit of greater happiness or satisfaction. But to be pulled by a current that leads to a poorly understood destination of questionable value is perhaps less of a good idea. Indulging frivolously in drugs and alcohol in pursuit of social lubrication is a common example among my fellow university students. Absent the affiliation motive, the incentive to engage in such behavior largely evaporates. I would suggest that the average 19-year-old lacks sufficient objectivity, maturity, responsibility, and foresight to properly balance the affiliation motive against other, perhaps more important concerns like health and school.
It’s in this multi-layered, badly defined, and constantly shifting social context that personalities are constructed, identities confirmed, and motivations derived. Especially in light of the well-established difficulty people have with going against social currents, the soil of the social landscape in which today’s young people sow the seeds of their development is thus of questionable quality, and deserves to be treated with the utmost care and attention.
It must be the money!
The atomization of academia and the pursuit of dollars.
Lamenting the failure of human rationality at fulfilling that great Enlightenment promise of the unification of human knowledge, 80-year old E.O. Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning philosopher-scientist at Harvard, posited one possible obstacle: “The most productive scientists, installed in million-dollar laboratories, have no time to think about the big picture and see little profit in it,” he writes in his intellectual tour-de-force, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Random House, 1998). “It is therefore not surprising to find physicists who do not know what a gene is, and biologists who guess that string theory has something to do with violins.”
He goes on to accuse the social sciences and humanities of the same “professional atomization.” My experience thus far at university has revealed the understated truth of this claim: beyond non-communication, my experience has shown tangible cross-disciplinary contempt. History professors mock political scientists, indicting them for the cardinal sins of generalization, oversimplification of complex realities, and constructing wild theories without empirical grounding (some of the worst offenders include Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” theory which arbitrarily divides the world into 7 “civilizations” ranging from “Hindu,” to “Slavic-Orthodox,” to “Japan,” and Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” theory which proclaimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy over all other forms of government and thus the end of ideological development… hm.)
And the political scientists are no better. “God help you,” was the response I got from the last one I told about my potential plans to study philosophy and psychology. “Without political science, you’ll be lost trying to make sense of the world,” he said. Clear cross-discipline competition to get one’s voice heard prevents constructive communication and interdisciplinary collaboration, even when many of these feuding faculties work on the same issues.
The cause appears to lie in the increasing competitiveness of today’s world. “To be an original scholar,” writes Wilson, “is to be a highly specialized world authority in a polyglot Calcutta of similarly focused world authorities.” To get an academic job in the first place requires prodigious research output; to get funding for further research once you are there demands even more.
According to the political scientist and Director of the University of Toronto’s African Studies Program Thomas Tieku, the pressure to compete for government research dollars in the United States has been a driving factor in political science’s drift towards increasing quantification into their description of political phenomena, in an effort to appear more scientific and therefore (apparently) more worthy of funding. The noble pursuit of truth and altruistic problem solving I looked forward to encountering back in August is eclipsed by the pursuit of dollars. It seems that the societal bias towards quantification over qualification, science over arts, and material over immaterial is at work here (see Sir Ken Robinson’s infamous TED talk for an eloquently persuasive elaboration). Although perhaps well-intentioned, the divisive effects of this strategy suggest that some social self-reflection might be in order.
The Agony, the Ecstasy and an Epiphany
Undergraduate teaching is in bad shape
I just got back from Europe, where I spent my reading week visiting NATO, various organs of the EU in Brussels, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and United Nations University in Bruges. My entire Global Governance class was lucky enough to have received full funding from the University of Toronto’s Internationalized Course Module, a fund dedicated to providing opportunities for students to complement their studies with international travel.
Such are the kind of benefits of attending university, where programs and funds seem to exist for every imaginable purpose and great opportunities abound. The Ecstasy lies therein.
Last semester I took a course with a professor who very fundamentally affected the way in which I view myself and the world around me. Almost every student I’ve encountered who has also had this professor has had similar experiences with his incredibly passionate and challenging teaching style. He teaches six courses and has taught here for 15 years. He produces leading research in his field. Yet the university has hitherto refused to provide him with any form of job security beyond sessional lectureship positions. As a result, he is seeking employment elsewhere, much to the dismay of the 300+ students who have signed a petition pressuring the university to retain him.
By the same token, I have tenured professors whose clear lack of passion and talent for teaching has left me completely turned off their subjects and rather disillusioned by the entire process of formal education itself. Undergraduate teaching at large universities is in bad shape, and solutions are in short supply. One idea I’ve heard is to encourage younger professors to focus on their research and on teaching graduate students who can benefit from the cutting-edge perspective of a researcher while letting the older, more experienced and proven professors neglect research in order to focus on teaching their subjects to undergraduates.
In the absence of such sweeping reforms, the reality of bad teaching seems here to stay. This annoyingly persistent failure of “teaching institutions” at recognizing value for their students (wherein lies the Agony) seems to be but one manifestation of a larger societal trend.
Consider this:
The question that most occupies my thoughts of what I am going to do with my life has reached great conclusion! An epiphany has finally stuck me, narrowing down the myriad of life and career choices ahead into a simple dichotomy, an easy two-way fork in the road that shall now be easy to navigate in light of the multifarious squid of options I have just overcome.
It is simply this: I shall either go into politics or I shall take Voltaire’s advice and cultivate a garden. My reasoning, which I judge important enough to my point to expound, is as follows: To achieve success in either pursuit, one must possess the same skills. One must first be able to sow. This in itself is easy enough. One then must provide the right quantity and quality of care for the seedling: providing enough nourishment and encouragement, maybe singing to it a little (apparently Mozart helps plants grow . . . ).
Once the thing has sprouted, one must protect it from the lecherous weeds that will threaten its progress, and continue to procure the resources necessary to ensure its lasting growth and health. If successful, after long months of labour and with perhaps a little luck, one is finally free to reap the fruits of success and revel, as Grandpa Joad so enjoyed, in the sweet juices of a peach (or a passed Bill) trickling down one’s chin.
A successful legislator must thus possess the same skills as a gardener. I believe these skills are actually fundamental to a host of careers, if not for all, and yet they are not those we learn in school. We are taught information in an age where an iPhone can in seconds download more information than you could learn, let alone produce, over the course of six PhDs. We are taught hard skills in a world where increasing interconnectedness demands the soft skills of a gardener. On a grander level, we value status and appearance (the two go hand in hand, of course) over substance and real power to affect real change.
This is why my dichotomy appears so ludicrous: in response to the question of the 21st century (“What do you do?”), “I plant trees” will elicit far less affect than “I plant laws.”
The irony is that politics, which is thought of in terms so much grander than gardening, often requires the successful practitioner to decorate himself with irrelevant degrees, qualifications, and other tinsel, when a gardener with a briefing could do his job just as well. We shouldn’t think of someone as more valuable simply because he has a degree, nor should we think of a degree as indicative of anything valuable in itself. At least not until degree-granting institutions begin to realize value in teaching.
The terror of intuition
A frightening alternative to thinking ahead.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a growing trend of “early-life crises” that I’ve been witnessing in myself and my peers. I concluded that serious self-examination was the best way to figure out what really makes you happy now in order to avoid suffering later. My views on this were reinforced when I read Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze’s “Bay Street Lawyer Blues,” a great article warning law school hopefuls of the harsh reality of lawyering at a prestigious firm. Unfortunately, as much as I can preach the virtues of thinking ahead and of exploring your own beliefs, goals, and values, I have to admit that progress is slow. Questioning every belief, thought, or idea that passes through your head is not fun, and I’m beginning to question the wisdom of the approach in the first place.
Indeed, many people claim, as I am often tempted to, that you just “know” what’s good. At first glance, this appears to be nothing more than a convenient escape from explanation, a sophisticated I-don’t-know. Upon closer examination, however, I think that this inexplicable knowledge is unavoidable. Whatever definition of good you arrive at, whether you simply equate happiness with goodness, or define it as something less utilitarian, there comes a point in the reasoning process where you cannot reduce the argument any further. Indeed, after you’ve worked your way through your prejudices, socially motivated contentions, and other external forms of motivation and meaning, it seems inevitable that you arrive at some “bottom,” that requires no further explanation because none is possible. The sophisticated I-don’t-know becomes an unsophisticated I-know-but-can’t-explain-it, and perhaps this is the best one can hope for.
Where this “bottom” occurs, however, is still within our control, and I think that exercising this control is very important. For instance, I am currently presented with two contrasting options for tentative summer plans. I can either ride my bike across Canada, or intern with the Government of Ontario. While the bike trip appeals to me more on the surface, I also think that the internship would be more conducive to a career in politics, which I think I might value. Rather than accept my interest in politics as the bottom of my reasoning, however, I pursue a deeper meaning, seeking to understand the roots of that interest, to find a more solid bottom.
The deeper I dig, however, the murkier things get. Something seems to appeal to me about joining the “elite” of Canadian society, but why? The money is appealing, but even that is no bottom. Money for what? I don’t know. I don’t think power is something I’m inherently interested in, so I rule that out as the bottom. A year ago I would’ve said I want to help improve the world, but now I’m not even sure about that. Why would I want the burden of governing millions of uninterested, unengaged, apathetic, spoiled Canadians? That doesn’t sound fun. Perhaps it’s an issue of egoism: a desire to have my ideas and intelligence validated and recognized. If so, that’s an awful reason to go into politics and I should be stopped at all costs. But the truth is, I can’t find the bottom. Maybe I should listen to what I “just know,” although accepting inexplicable motivation does imply a frightening sacrifice of control. Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not you believe the unexamined life is worth living.
What to do when your course load gets too heavy…
Take a deep breath and keep things in perspective.
Mid-terms this week have seen a surge in half-joking threats from myself and my friends to drop out of school to pursue a lifestyle that is more fulfilling and true to our passions. It’s easy to justify dropping out: the longer you stay in academia, the more deeply entrenched you become in the system, the more investments in time and money you make, the harder it is to take a year or two to go live in a communal hippie utopia on the beaches of Thailand or to become a ski bum in Whistler. University, on the other hand, will always be here to return to.
However appealing it may be to ditch school in favor of an alternative way of life, most of us, including myself, have already bought in to the system to such an extent that we won’t so readily follow through on our stress-induced daydreams. Until that changes, I find that one way to keep things in perspective and beat back the stress so inevitably associated with soul-destroying examinations is to meditate.
To take even five minutes a day to try and clear your mind from the incessant thoughts that cloud your consciousness can be enormously beneficial for concentration, communication, a healthy perspective, and general well-being and happiness.
To just “be,” free from worries about the future or regrets of the past, is a liberating, if elusive feeling. One way to do this is to just sit and focus on your breath, observing it. Whenever you find that you have been carried away by thought, return your focus to your breath. This is actually enormously challenging — I can rarely get through more than two or three cycles of breath before I find myself swept away by thought once more.
The discovery of how difficult it is to remain “in the moment” and free from thought even for a few seconds is in itself beneficial. When you become aware that you are constantly constructing narratives, plans, worries, regrets, fears, hopes, and so on, it becomes possible to gain control over them. If our constant stream-of-consciousness remains below our consciousness, we are powerless to them.
Especially during exam times when stress levels are high, this awareness and associated control can be very helpful indeed. It can help us recognize absurd stories we are subconsciously telling ourselves that are exacerbating the stress, and correct them.
As the Dalai Lama puts it, it “enables us to see thoughts and emotions as mere thoughts and emotions, rather than as ‘me’ and ‘mine.’ [Then] we begin to have choices. Certain thoughts and emotions are helpful, so we encourage them. Others are not so helpful, so we just let them go.” For instance, worrying and stressing about upcoming tests does not help us perform well – becoming aware of how we are creating those barriers to success allows us to stop creating them altogether.
From my experience, the academic benefits of a clear and conscious mind are just scratching the surface of how meditation is conducive to a better life. Give it a try and see for yourself.
UBC student union prefer cows to Nietzsche
AMS is at it again with a proposal to impose a $5 punishment on non-voters.
In yet another ridiculous move on the part of the UBC Alma Mater Society, the country’s largest student union is proposing a $5 fine imposed on all students at the beginning of the year, to be refunded only if you vote in their elections. While I tend to agree with Nietzsche that those who don’t want to participate in democracy shouldn’t be forced to, since their lack of interest will actually harm the democratic process, the AMS seems to be suggesting that the electorate will be suddenly motivated to rigorously research and weigh all the candidates, making the decision they think is best for their school and enhancing the oh-so-important-and-relevant democratic process of student union elections. Ha ha ha.
In fact, the AMS would really just be herding uninterested cows into the ring to mindlessly moo in order to avoid a fee. The random button clicking that would surely ensue (voting for AMS elections is done online) would ultimately reduce the representativeness of the union, replace quality with quantity, and degrade the democratic process in favor of louder mooing.
Let’s hope those who actually vote voluntarily on this referendum, which is being proposed alongside the AMS general election this week, do so with more thought than would be on display next year should this proposal pass.
Humanities for Humanity
Is it a problem that only one per cent of the world has a university education?
Only one per cent of the world’s population has a university education. The common complaint that academics dwell in ivory towers, far removed from the realities they study and critique is infinitely more poignant when viewed in light of this vast disparity. One per cent of the world’s population, whose parents (most often) happen to be economically fortunate enough to pay for higher education in the first place, is tasked with studying, theorizing, and predicting the future of every aspect of human society. Their studies are used by politicians to legislate new laws and acts. And yet, the experiences and perspectives of this one per cent are narrow and limited compared to the ninety-nine per cent they study.
Trinity College at the University of Toronto has come up with an innovative way to improve this imbalanced pursuit. Humanities for Humanity is a unique program that pairs disadvantaged members of society — single moms, disabled retirees, Rwandan refugees, and so on — with Trinity students for weekly sessions of “reality based philosophy.”
The 12 sessions, which together attempt to trace a very rough history of moral, political, social, and economic thought in the West since the Middle Ages, each focus on one longish reading from thinkers such Machiavelli, Marx, Hobbes, and Adam Smith. The 40 or so members of the community and the 10 “student mentors” (this term carries the probably mistaken connotation that we can teach the “disadvantaged” more than they can teach us) are expected to read the work before class, which consists of a one-hour lecture from a U of T professor of whichever subject we’re focusing on, followed by an hour of smaller group discussions facilitated by the “mentors.”
I just came from the first session, which was based on Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, essentially the first compilation of the many King Arthur-focused stories that had been floating around Europe for a few centuries prior to Malory writing them down in the 15th century. The class discussed themes of power, trust, betrayal, and virtue in the context of the medieval soap opera. It was certainly a different experience than any class discussion I’ve had to date.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the evening was before class even began. I was sitting next to a seemingly wise old woman who had moved here from the Caribbean years before. She had plenty of much-appreciated advice to give about the value of patience and determination in determining a career, and so on, which carried on pleasantly until the woman next to us, from Zimbabwe, chipped in.
We had been discussing yoga and meditation when our new Zimbabwean friend mentioned that in her country, yoga was illegal, going on to timidly criticize the regime of Zimbabwe’s dictator President Robert Mugabe. At this point, the tact of my Caribbean friend vanished as she began almost praising Mugabe, saying that since the West had (in her view) killed Martin Luther King Jr., Mugabe’s violence towards pro-Western political groups is justified. Disregarding the argument that two wrongs don’t make a right, Mugabe’s violence is directed essentially at retaining power, which he’s had for 30 years, not at some ideological anti-Western goal.
Similarly far-fetched arguments and bizarre perspectives were to remain the norm for the rest of the night. The lack of coherency and articulation with which these views were proposed by the largely uneducated group made it all the more difficult to take seriously. While this initially made me think that the fortunate one percent might do fine to stay in their towers, some reconsideration has led me to believe that perhaps there are benefits in this process after all. Attempting to understand why these people hold such views could potentially shed light on many important aspects of humanity. In that sense, I think an occasional jaunt down the ivory towers might be worthwhile after all.
Why you should think ahead
Don’t struggle through four years of dissatisfaction
My last post, which suggested choosing a major based on passion rather than career considerations, drew some interesting feedback. The comment essentially suggested that it is better to be unhappily employed than to have studied something you love and risk unemployment. “We do not need more liberal arts graduates that are unemployed and underemployed because they took the bait of ‘study what you love,’” said the commenter.
While I surely concede that employment is generally necessary for a stable and happy life (although Thoreau wouldn’t likely agree), the idea of studying something you don’t enjoy only to get a job that you are no more likely to enjoy still strikes me as a frightening sacrifice to have to make. Having been reunited with several old friends over the Christmas break, I’ve noticed a very consistent trend of dissatisfaction with their courses of study and with university in general. As one friend put it, “I worked so hard in high school to get good marks and win scholarships so that I could go to university, only to get here and realize that I am no better of a person for having accomplished it.” I think this comment illustrates very well the problem of pursuing a goal because you think it’s practical or because you think you’re expected to, without coming to the conclusion that you ought to because you want to, independently of external influence.
Two of my friends are taking a year off from university altogether, to pursue activities they actually love and to discover what makes them happy. I have no doubt that once they answer this important question, they will return to university, study what they love, and translate the knowledge, skills, and passion (this is the important part) into a fulfilling career. Other friends (and I) are staying in university but are changing their course of study altogether. The qualities that I think are essential to a successful career are not developed by struggling through four years of stress and dissatisfaction. Not only does studying something you love facilitate a better GPA, but it allows for innovation, creativity, thinking and exploring beyond the beaten path. Surely these are the qualities that foster a truly successful career.
Left unaddressed, the quarter-life crisis I am witnessing among my peers – characterized by questioning the meaning of previously held beliefs and goals and disappointment with a major life change – will yield nothing more than another crisis, of mid-life this time, 20 years down the road. A middle-aged corporate lawyer I know helped shed some light on the crux of the issue: “Find something you love,” he said. “If you can’t, go to law school.” Discovering what it is you love is certainly no easy task, but to ignore it altogether in favor of pursuing a career is ultimately dangerous. The discovery will inevitably come eventually, so by actively pursuing the question and using the search as a lens through which to view the rest of your life ensures that the answer doesn’t come too late: once you’ve already spent many years and many thousands of dollars pursuing something only to realize you don’t actually enjoy it, making the switch will be much harder than getting it right in the first place. To put effort into exploring your self and your passions before settling on a job-focused university career is thus to avoid suffering later.
Study what you love
The trials of choosing a major
From what I want to study to what kind of world I idealize, there is no doubt that my first four months of independence have changed me, and the distance with which I now view those experiences, having just returned home for the holidays, affords me new and revealing perspective on my first semester of university.
Firstly, an academic dilemma has fostered just as much self-examination as my social conundrum. I came to school with the intention of majoring in international relations; my very decision to come to Trinity was based partly on their unmatched IR program. I’ve always been interested in and passionate about issues of international scope. It has always struck me that perhaps the most important issues facing humanity require solutions to be implemented at the international level. Thus, studying international relations seemed like a good idea.
The study of international relations at U of T is divided among the Departments of History, Political Science, and Economics. Cool, I thought, I like the sound of all of those. Four out of my six first year courses were dictated by my choice to major in international relations. I like one of them. The others — introductory economics and two political science courses — well . . . appropriate euphemisms escape me. I do enjoy my history of international relations course, but I’ve come to some realizations regarding the other disciplines that I wish I had understood earlier.
Political science, for instance, is not at all scientific. As far as I can tell with my obviously sparse understanding of the discipline, political science vainly attempts to squash the unsquashable nuances of political society into narrow, inflexible definitions and theories, necessarily omitting certain aspects of reality in order to achieve artificial coherency. The competing theories of realism and liberalism stand in irreconcilable opposition, each making their respective claims about human nature and the behavior of states, neither willing to compromise its convictions in the face of opposing evidence. Studying the world from such a normative perspective seems dangerous to me. History, with its focus on empirical evidence and its reluctance to make predictions or to create sweeping theories on the basis of its discoveries, seems a better way to understand why the world is the way it is.
Economics also shares this focus on empirical data, but unfortunately, it’s just boring. Again, my views are undoubtedly limited by my continued naivete and perhaps a bit of wishful thinking, but I suspect that for my purposes, I could achieve a sufficient understanding of economic activity without learning how to manipulate graphs of short- and long-run equilibrium. Maybe I’m wrong. Either way, I hate economics, and any discipline that takes as its starting point the assumption that human beings are always rational arouses serious suspicion in me.
Which brings to me a side point: it’s very easy to “learn” just enough to pass an exam — indeed, to get an entire degree — without actually learning anything. My economics course is a perfect illustration. The material is dry and the professor drier, so I don’t do the readings, don’t go to class, cram for two days before the exam, memorizing only that which I know I’m going to be tested on and nothing else, and I always manage to pull off a solid mark. Not a great mark, but enough to pass the course and go on to take more economics courses if I wanted to.
A tug-of-war with my self
University no escape from high-school cliques
The process of self-discovery I long anticipated to occur in first year of university is in full-swing. The first taste of independence, incessant socializing, and unprecedented stress management required are accelerating the infinite process of self-discovery to an extent I apparently failed to appreciate. Not only is my idealism being challenged – I’m being forced daily to explore and question the fundamental ways in which I look at the world and at myself.
The first sphere of influence my beliefs and convictions have run up against is that of College social life. In high school, it took me a long time – about 3 and half years to be precise – to stop trying to be someone I wasn’t in order to fit in with whom I perceived as “cool.” I eventually came to the intuitive understanding that it’s impossible to sustain a personality that isn’t naturally your own, so I embraced who I was, became friends with people I was genuinely interested in and who were genuinely interested in me. I ceased my fruitless and futile pursuit of popularity for it’s own sake.
Here at university, I’m finding the whole process is starting over again, albeit with a few more complicating factors thrown in. There is a clear parallel to my early high-school years in that I am drawn towards certain cliques that have been agreed by some unspoken understanding to be comprised of the most popular kids, while my most meaningful relationships already lie outside of those cliques.
Trinity is a small enough school that I see everyone I know every day, and so at meals I alternate between sitting with the “cool” kids, who I like chatting and partying with; and my much more philosophical, cerebral, “nerdy” friends where dinner is always accompanied by a discussion of the value of rationality over intuition, or whether killing babies is inherently bad (it’s not). While I don’t feel compelled to make a cut-and-dry decision as to what clique I belong in (I do, however, believe that depth is inevitably sacrificed in favor of breadth), the experiences with both groups inevitably shed light on my own personality.
On the one hand, the cool kids don’t seem to read into things very much; they are happy to remain in the realm of small-talk and get annoyed when I attempt to analyze or find meaning in what they say; a habit that I have neither managed to shake, nor particularly want to. Of course, this perception is probably flawed since I remain for the most part an outsider observing only the public behaviors of the group. Even it was an accurate perception, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with such superficial interactions, but I do think my habit of incessant over-analysis is here to stay. These guys, however, seem to have a hell of a lot of fun without seeking meaning or explanations. They seem to intuitively know what is good, what makes them happy.
On the other hand, the Philosopher Kings spend their days trying to understand what is “good” and trying to figure out if happiness is even worth pursuing as an end in itself over, say, knowledge. I actually quite enjoy thinking about these things, but this is where things get even more complicated. The one course I have really enjoyed and found genuinely challenging so far, Buddhism and Cognitive Science, seeks to explain how people find meaning. Most of the theories we have encountered suggest that this is done pre-supposing logic.
Whether you call it intuition or choose to invoke a fancy Greek word like religio, it seems that people ultimately find meaning and happiness without actually thinking about it. This makes sense when you actually try to define what is meaningful, what is good, using pure reason. It’s very hard. In the thousands of years of philosophical history, no one has managed to objectively define these concepts to the point where everyone agrees; what an individual finds meaningful or good (and which is therefore the basis for his behavior and beliefs) remains very much up to the individual to decide in some pre-logical, subjective way.
Still, the cynic in me continues to distrust that which cannot be explained logically, and so these questions remain unanswered in my mind. It’s a tug-of-war between logic and intuition, with no clear winner in sight. Juggling this existential angst while struggling through the incredibly annoying process of memorization and regurgitation known as mid-terms, I’m surprisingly glad to be going home in 2 weeks for some much-needed relaxation.
Do your research
The university you end up at will have farther reaching consequences that you might expect.
Almost three months into university and I am only now discovering institutions I wish I had known about 6 months ago. Here are a few examples.
This small liberal arts college in Maine markets itself as a school “for idealists with elbow grease.” There’s only one major – human ecology – with a wide variety of routes you design yourself within that broad but guiding discipline. 305 students, average class size of 12. Tuition: $41,550. Average aid: $28, 020. SAT’s not required!
Admitting students for the first time this fall, NYU Abu Dhabi marks a recent trend of world-class American universities opening campuses in the Middle East. Marketing itself as “The World’s Honors College,” they hope to attract the best and brightest students from around the world. The intensely competitive admissions process includes a “finalist weekend” spent at the Abu Dhabi campus, but NYU rewards those who do make the cut with complete financial aid.
This anomaly in higher education boasts a grand total of 26 students. Isolated in the Deep Springs Valley in rural California, an hour drive away from the nearest human population, the school / cattle ranch accepts 10 – 15 students a year out of 100 – 200 applicants, meaning it’s often more selective than Harvard and Yale. Indeed, after two years spent laboring 20 hours a week on the ranch (part of the deal) and learning in classes of 8, Deep Springs students go on to complete the final two years of their degree at the best institutions in the world. Students at the College hire the professors, select new students, and set the curriculum. Tuition, room, and board are paid for those accepted.
Point being, do your research and do it well. Make sure you know all your options. Talk to as many people as possible. Think about yourself and what you want out of a university in terms of academics, social life, reputation, etc. University years are inevitably some of the most formative of your life, and the environment in which you choose to spend these years is undoubtedly crucial to your personal, intellectual, and social development. So think carefully.
U of T sessional faculty strike seems imminent
With 2 days left of negotiations, U of T administration insists classes will not be cancelled in the event of a Monday strike.
U of T’s administration tabled a new proposal in negotiations this afternoon, hoping to reach an agreement with the sessional faculty union (CUPE 3902, Unit 3) before the fast approaching bargaining deadline of Monday the 9th. According to their website, the proposal “still falls short” of the Union’s mandate, and was thus rejected. The major issues being negotiated involve pay and job security; an in-depth discussion of the plight of sessional faculty members is found here.
Talks are scheduled to continue throughout the weekend, and despite what appears to be a real willingness to strike (the Union is already asking its members to sign up for picket duty), the University insists that classes will not be cancelled in the event of a strike. They have made it clear that Teaching Assistants will not be asked to fill in for the sessional faculty members. How they plan to find replacement professors for the 30% of classes affected remains an unexplained mystery.
U of T sessional faculty set to strike
30% of classes could be cancelled beginning Nov. 9
At the beginning of my Buddhism and Cognitive Science class last Friday at the University of Toronto, my professor informed our class that the sessional faculty labour union (CUPE 3902), of which he is a member, will be in legal strike position starting Nov. 9. While negotiations with the university are ongoing, failure to come to an agreement by that day would probably mean indefinite cancellation of the 30 per cent of classes at U of T taught by sessional faculty.
Obviously nobody wants a repeat of the catastrophic York strike last year (where, incidentally, sessional faculty members earn 13 per cent more than their counterparts at U of T), but the motivation behind the strike seems hard to ignore. Currently, sessional faculty, almost all of whom hold PhDs, have to re-apply for their jobs every four to eight months and are paid only $2.25 more per course than a U of T graduate student with no PhD and no teaching experience. Considering my professor has been teaching at the university for 16 years and has won numerous teaching awards, this level of compensation and job security is absurd.
With the University of Toronto Students’ Union officially supporting the sessional faculty, CUPE 3902 has indicated that it intends to sue the university to refund students’ tuition should classes be cancelled. Along with the thousands of other students potentially affected by this strike, I’ll be holding my breath until Nov. 9.
Dance, monkey, dance!
Balancing the circus of life with the meaning of life is very hard.
First, some Robertson Davies to justify my copious use of quotations: “God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!”
Youth is indeed a time of turmoil, in many senses, which is why I think it’s justified that I invoke these little pieces of wisdom to help me though these uncertain times. Another quote then, this time from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to describe this week’s turmoil: “When you have to attend to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality fades.”
A little context: Without much protest, I think most people would agree that having a sense of meaning and connection to something beyond yourself is really important in life. Whether this comes through good friends, a hobby, religion, family, or anything else that gives people a sense of purpose, this is what I understand Conrad’s “reality” to mean.
So what exactly is getting in the way of this reality? Well, this week and next are midterms. That involves a lot of work, which, given the choice, I probably would rather not do. It’s interesting stuff for the most part, and I enjoy the initial learning of it, the gaining of new knowledge and perspective, but studying it for 7 hours a day is a bit much. Jumping through these hoops in order to do well in school and come out with a degree is what I understand Conrad’s “mere incidents of the surface” to mean.
This kind of thinking really makes me want to drop out of school and move to Thailand to teach scuba diving, writing off the mere incidents of the surface in favor a soul-searching adventure in paradise, but I like to think I know better. Conventional wisdom would have me believe that by working hard to jump through the hoops now, I’ll be able to enjoy a much better lifestyle in the future than I would if I dropped out now and moved to the tropics. This argument doesn’t hold any water as long as my picture of the ideal life involves living on the beach, but I expect this yearning to subside, only to resurface with the next round of exams. I suppose this balancing act is something I’ll have to get used to, as I don’t expect life after graduation to be any less full of hoops to jump through.
Maybe conventional wisdom isn’t so wise after all…
The fork in the road
Don’t waste time regretting big decisions (like your choice of university)
I had a very hard time deciding where to go to university. One of the hardest parts was my choice to turn down a position with the House of Commons page program, where I would have worked on the floor of the House in the midst of the political process. For whatever reasons seemed relevant at the time, I decided it wasn’t the best place for me, so now I’m at the University of Toronto.
I’m very happy here, but whenever Canadian politics comes up in conversation I feel a twinge of regret. I find myself trying to justify the decision I made, coming up with reasons why the decision I made was better (the university has a better reputation, the school provides a great sense of community) and why I wouldn’t have been happy there (the House of Commons is full of discouragingly barbaric MPs, Ottawa is less interesting than Toronto, and so on). It’s stupid, I know, but apparently the grass is always greener on the other side.
Despite the obvious fact that I have no idea how happy I would be in Ottawa (having not experienced it), I think that the root of this problem is that I’m attaching my happiness to something outside of myself. I realize that real, non-temporary happiness is ultimately independent of anything outside myself, but I still can’t help myself from slipping into this black hole of regret. Being in Ottawa and making high-powered connections in the political world might be exciting and, sure, it would make me feel pretty good. But the feelings would pass, just as an unhappy person who buys a new car will still be unhappy after the initial thrill wears off. A happy person will still be happy if he gets a new car, since his happiness is not attached to something external.
In this light, I suppose my spurts of regret are essentially a non-material form of buyer’s remorse. Choosing where to go to university is a very big decision, and whenever you make a big decision you’re bound to regret it at some point, because while you’ve opened one door, you’ve inevitably closed another. This is scary, since you want to know you made the “right” choice, but you can’t.
When I do find myself slipping into this realm of doubt and regret, I have to remind myself of something that might sound a little ethereal. I was fortunate enough to visit every university I was considering, and when I came to U of T it just felt right, while this feeling was completely absent in Ottawa. I think this relates to what I wrote about last week, namely the inadequacy of logic in some instances. When you “just know” something is right – even if logic suggests another option – I think it’s wise to follow that feeling. After all, nobody knows what’s best for you better than you do – even if you can’t explain it.
A knife all blade
How do you remain an idealist in the hard, logical world of academia?
I’ve been thinking a lot about idealism lately. I entered university an idealist, believing a more sustainable and equitable world than the one we currently inhabit is achievable. Over the course my my first three weeks here, my idealism has been consistently challenged by my peers, my professors, even my textbooks, and I find myself scrambling to reconcile what I’m learning with my beliefs and goals.
The challenges have arrived mostly in the form of logical arguments regarding why my idealism is unrealistic, so my attempts at reconciliation have been similarly rooted in logic, which is proving to be very difficult. For example, in discussing whether altruism exists or not, it’s very hard to come up with examples of pure altruism to prove that it does exist, since any seemingly altruistic act ultimately makes you feel good about yourself and is therefore in your self-interest. Logic, it seems, is inadequate to prove that altruism exists.
Similarly, in my Global Governance class, we’ve been discussing the idea of a world government which would legislate and enforce laws for the entire world and would therefore be much better than we are now at dealing with global problems like climate change or terrorism. But, for many practical reasons, the idea is considered overly idealistic and unrealistic: another instance of idealism getting bogged down in logic.
Even despite the seemingly overwhelming logic confronting much of my idealism, when I read great thinkers like Oscar Wilde saying that “a map of the world without Utopia is not worth looking at,” I think it might be worth clinging to.
There’s another quote I like that goes: “a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It cuts the hand that uses it.” I recalled this bit of wisdom from the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore yesterday as I was listening to a monk at a Buddhist temple I was visiting out of interest, and it struck me that perhaps I’ve been overly focused on logic while neglecting intuition. Of course, universities are institutions of logic and reasoning, so my recent trend of over-intellectualizing things is perhaps understandable. At the temple, however, there was much talk of how to live a happy and yes, idealistic life, without logic ever being inferred.
Of course, religions rarely feel impelled to justify their teachings with logic, and yet the teachings certainly manage to resonate with many millions of people. After all, extolling virtues of generosity, peace and love, wisdom, and connectedness to others should hardly need justification, and these are essentially the virtues on which most idealism (most of mine, anyway) is based.
So for now, I think I’ll ignore the dissenting voices of logical pessimism and keep my eyes focused on Wilde’s Utopia, justified (I’m still not totally off logic) with one last quote popularized by the ever-wise Kanye West : “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”
