Sharing, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Lectures

The common thread that has run throughout my life has been a love of learning, and I am at the beginning of what I hope will be a many-year Renaissance of large-scale learning in my life. I just returned to college at age 31 to finish my bachelors degree in economics, which has been a 15 year project so far considering some of my AP credits date back to my junior year in high school. This is my last chance to graduate and validate the massive expense my family has borne to put me through my schooling, not to mention the time and energy I’ve spent getting to where I am: within 11 hours of graduating.

I’ve always detested the formal education system and never been able to just accept it for what it is, or accept that it had anything real to offer me; now I find my opinions changing. Half of me no longer cares about fighting the process and just wants the piece of paper that the world seems to value so much. The rest of me is so desperate to bring learning back to the forefront of my life that I’m willing to accept the college environment, with all of its flaws, just for being a place where people go to learn. It’s not that I don’t find people interested in learning in my everyday life, but even on a college campus it’s very difficult to find individuals who will engage in candid and honest intellectual exploration of a topic, or true debate, without the incentives of grades and the rigorous structures of lectures and exams.

As I go through life I realize that learning without others physically nearby to learn from and with is both more difficult and less fulfilling, and less fruitful. Suddenly the structure, the bureaucracy, the gross expense of formal schooling doesn’t seem quite as bad, because the returns can be so great. There are thoughts in my head that I have never had the vocabulary to express, and the words I seek lie behind library doors and in the minds of professors and students I’ve yet to meet. Just dipping my toes back into academia has me dying to return full time, considering graduate studies and wondering what it takes to make a career in academia when your school resume looks as disgruntled as mine. Teaching has never appealed to me, but the idea of sharing ideas all day has and does. Maybe I've been wrong to differentiate between the two to the extent that I have.