Look back, look ahead, and try your best to learn something new
I came to the University of Guelph dressed in my finest beige shorts and my favourite white polo shirt. It was the same outfit I’d worn back in high school, and, suffice it to say, I felt absolutely no need to try anything new.
I was told that university would change my thinking—that the people I’d encounter would irreversibly affect how I think about the world. Here I stand, four years later, incapable of truly comprehending all of the microscopic changes that I’ve witnessed, but certain that something about me has to be different.
I digress. I came to the University of Guelph dressed in beige shorts and a white polo shirt.
After all, if it worked in high school, why wouldn’t it work in university? The truth was shocking.
It worked in university. Of course it worked in university. Why wouldn’t it have worked in university?
This school that we attend is an institution like any other, and while there might be a higher concentration of students wearing plaid, blue jeans, and cowboy boots, the standard staple shirt and shorts combination remains a simple standard for one staple reason: it’s sufficient.
Call me cynical, but I never really saw a huge change between high school and university. Maybe that’s the point.
My high school teachers reinforced the idea that high school was preparation for the world ahead.
“Work hard, study responsibly, indulge occasionally, maintain healthy habits, and those habits will remain with you for the rest of your life,” they implied.
Granted, their advice was—and still is—applicable to any number of circumstances. To those unconvinced by my cold cynicism, allow me to present an argument: university is an opportunity for a fresh start, but only if you choose to take that opportunity.
I’ve known University of Guelph students whose habits were identical to those in high school. They went to class everyday, they did their homework regularly, they went out on Friday night, and then they spent the rest of the weekend catching up on equal combinations of sleep and stress-relief.
I’ve also known University of Guelph students whose habits were the exact opposite of those in high school. They redefined their self-images, they skipped classes, mid-terms, and exams, and they spent almost every moment of their university careers in a foggy self-medicated haze.
University doesn’t just juxtapose, it also establishes great ironies.
Some of the hardworking failed, and some of the lazy succeeded beyond all sense of reason. Some of the science enthusiasts proved to be philosophical masterminds, while some of the philosophical proved to be quite business-minded. The would-be writers became doctors, the wannabe doctors became lawyers, and the alleged lawyers—oddly enough—took it upon themselves to stand for the rights of those forced to sit down.
University gives people the chance to try something new, while also establishing an environment in which these trials are positively reinforced.
For instance, I proved once-and-for-all that I was never destined to don the surgical mask and white coat of my desired profession. So, I put down the scalpel. No, seriously. During the final practice session before my second-year behavioural neuroscience lab exam, my groupmates literally told me to put down the scalpel because I’d cut through one of their binders.
I didn’t do so well on that exam, or that class for that matter—or that program, now that we’re on the subject.
University teaches hard-earned lessons in success and failure.
My “fresh start” came almost two years after I’d started university, and it wasn’t because I was rebelling against the system or because I wanted to change my outlook on life. It was because, at the great barbeque of academia, I’d thoroughly burnt the meat, as well as the entire kitchen. I tried something new because I had to try something new—the fact that it worked is a miracle unto itself.
University is what one makes of it precisely because life is what one makes of it.
Who I am, what I believe in, what I think is morally praiseworthy and morally obligatory have changed—not by choice, but by necessity. I have met people, often by accident, who used words that I’d never heard before—who had ideas that I couldn’t understand without their help. They made me look at my life, and the lives of those around me, from perspectives that I’d never thought imaginable.
I have also met stubborn people who never make like a rock, and roll. Instead, like a pot of sauce at low heat, they stay idle—softly simmering at the surface, and refusing to adapt.
I also knew one student who brought with her to university an almost categorical disdain for alcohol and whose current ability to imbibe now borders on alcoholic.
My point is this: change if you want to change, stay the same if you want to stay the same, but know that your understanding of your sense of self is a constantly ebbing and flowing whirlpool of growth and regression.
We’re humans. We’re changeable. In fact, that’s almost literally the only guaranteed constant theme in the great book of life: things change, identities change, and people change.
Over the next four years, over the next three years, over the next two years, over the course of the rest of our lives, we will—all of us—be presented with countless opportunities to change our points-of-view and redefine our beliefs and ideologies. Sometimes, we’ll meet individuals whose outlooks are so far removed from what we consider normal that we are utterly unable to meet with them to compromise.
I’ve found that the best place to start is somewhere in the middle.