Last week, I started doing something that made me realize the semester was in full swing. I started worrying. Not about tests or papers or deadlines, but about my courses for next semester.
Naturally, I planned around the courses I needed for my major, but then came time to round out my schedule with that all-important fourth class. What to take? Free of most of my C2K and major pre-requisites, my options seemed endless. How about something in another department? Another language? What about something fun? Independent study?
But reality soon set in.
Spring of junior year: the public policy internship search, June LSAT-and don't forget the importance of keeping up a GPA for law school. Better pick something easy.
Totally confounded, I sought divine inspiration. But it wasn't God who spoke to me; it was Reverend Sam Wells, newly installed Dean of the Chapel. The opening lines of his first official sermon struck me: "I am disputing the notion that this University doesn't have a heart, that the university is just a kind of transit camp that young people pass through? The university is not just a soulless shopping mall, a space that simply facilitates the acquiring of qualifications."
Aha! This was the reason for my dilemma. You see, the huge problem facing us as undergraduates is the fact that so many times we see Dear Old Duke as a "transit camp," a stepping stone for bigger and better things down the road.
For many of us, the real prize is law/business/medical/graduate school. It's competitive, and we're busy. So we do what students at all other top-tier schools do. We pick classes and experiences using a crude cost-benefit analysis that judges how well it will contribute to our chance of being accepted to the grad/professional school of our dreams.
We view opportunities that aren't essential as a drain on our time. Why do more than we have to?
After all, if you're pre-med, an insightful, challenging history course probably won't help you get into Johns Hopkins and could actually bring your grade point average down a hair. Why risk it?
It makes logical sense. But by fixating on our future, we impoverish our present. We rule out experiences that could be tremendously rewarding in an intellectual sense, just because they contribute little or nothing to our resumes.
Still, if the logic is sound, who can argue with our tendency for academic risk aversion? Reverend Wells once again offers a thought: "The university is a moral project, an ongoing conversation that displays and compares and tests and evaluates, that cherishes the wisdom of tradition and explores the possibilities of discovery.
"The university does these things because these things are worth doing-worth doing for their own sake."
The reasoning is purely normative. Sure, the administration can talk about the sense of accomplishment you'll feel or the research skills you'll gain or the benefit of a liberal arts education. But at the end of the day we need to branch out and dare and experiment simply because it's the right thing to do. These things make our undergraduate experience richer.
The trouble is, no legislation from Duke Student Government or administrative policy can bring about such a change. The decision must ultimately be made by each of us as an individual student.
How can we do this? In the coming weeks, when spring registration opens, do something out of the ordinary. Sign up for a class you don't need for C2K or your major. Audit a course, just because it sounds interesting. Find a faculty member whose class you enjoyed and start an independent study or an honors thesis.
Let's make Duke more than a prep school for a Yale JD or a Michigan MBA. Let's stop succumbing to the same pressure that befalls our counterparts at other schools. Let's enjoy our four years here in and of themselves.
Sure, our GPAs might be a fraction of a point lower than theirs, but who cares? We'll be better rounded, more interesting people for the effort.
As for me, I've realized it's time to start taking classes that will make me a better person and student, instead of a better law school applicant.
I'm thinking about English 245S: "Celebrity, Scandal, Obscurity: the 19th Century Poet."
Joe Fore is a Trinity junior and Duke Student Government vice president of academic affairs.
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