Last night, @CarleeMallard threw an interesting idea out into the Twitter-verse: “I think we were all more interesting people in college. Why is that?”
I was taken aback at first – I cringe to think that freshman Ellen with a penchant for power hours was more interesting than the slightly more mature, slightly less naive Ellen of present. But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Carlee might be right.
In college we’re immersed in 4-6 completely new learning environments every September and January. Those eight semesters (or ten if you’re like me) can be entirely fresh starts – new classmates, new professors, new subject matter. Rarely do we encounter a similar situation in the working world.
While many of us continue to seek out educational opportunities after graduation, the scope of our new learning tends be limited to those subjects in which we already have an interest. In college, we’re often forced to explore topics that we’d never consider on our own simply for the sake of fulfilling some obscure “Communications B” requirement.
Case in point: during my sophomore year, I went out on a limb and took Genres of Asian Religious Writings (to fulfill that very requirement). Growing up in a Catholic household in a town of less than 4,000, my knowledge of (and initial interest in) Asian religions was roughly zero. The one thing I thought I knew about Buddhism was promptly proved incorrect during our first lecture (The Buddha is NOT a fat Chinese gentleman). Three months later, I was enamored with Buddhism, knew a thing or two about Confucianism, and had read an abridged version of a Hindu epic. I loved it.
Three years, I graduated with a Certificate in Religious Studies. I took an entire class on Dante’s Divine Comedy. When else in our lives do we have the opportunity (or the time) to do something so…obscure?
In general, I think we’re much more focused on possibilities than on actualities during our college years. Our lives seem more…unscripted. If we stay up until 4 in the morning discussing our life story with our new best friend, we can still roll out of bed 10 minutes before class and get where we need to be. While we might not retain much, it’s not as though we have to worry about the professor doling out a poor performance evaluation because we’re dozing off during a meeting.
I wouldn’t completely agree that our “apex of interesting” occurs in college, but I think outside of the university, it’s easy to fall into routines and habits that limit our exposure to the new and unexpected.
Were there any classes you took in college that led to more than you’d ever expected? If you’ve already graduated, how have you continued to expose yourself to new/previously unexplored interests?
