There is an interesting dilemma evident throughout my entire collegiate journey, an ever-present tension that leaves me both optimistic about my time in college and detached from it. On one hand, college enabled me, at the very least, to go within myself and extract a confidence to do projects, explore topics, and take the initiative to fully dive into things head first, ready to learn from the inside out. I’m more comfortable than ever immersing myself in things, learning from that immersion rather than from a distance. 

Truly, I fear little to nothing now when conceptualizing, creating, and displaying work other than my own self-rejection if something doesn’t turn out as well as I know I’m capable of doing. I was given a platform to discover a new passion–photography, videography, and digital creation–the opportunity to refine my ethics, and the consistent ability to tangibly put my thoughts and creativity into action. 

There’s a lot that I’ve done and accomplished that I’m immensely proud of, things that prior to college I wouldn’t have had the skill and most importantly the confidence to do. And I’m supremely grateful for that. I’m grateful for having a lot of gracious and inspiring professors who allowed me to rewrite my journey, and I’m grateful for many of the conversations, interactions, and experiences I have had. 

But on that note, college has also left me with pervading feelings of inadequacy and a tentative feeling towards myself and my capabilities and the world I am about to enter. My model of learning from immersion was the result of college fundamentally tearing me down as a person and as a student until I had no choice but to approach myself and my relationship with learning from a different perspective. I isolated what emboldened me the most, what intrigued and fulfilled me the most in what was essentially a recreation of who I am, and threw everything I had into it. That is, I found something that truly inspired me, and yet I feel I was only capable of harnessing that inspiration in fleeting moments. 

Because ultimately the schematics of the collegiate system are not about self-discovery, they are about checking boxes and conforming to the expectations that are associated with our role as students and our future roles as workers in a vast system of competition and degradation. College is not about becoming an empowered and equipped person; it is not about finding something that inspires you and letting that guide your learning and development; it is not about gaining ethereal consciousness about yourself and the world; it is about getting a degree with a few stops for inspiration along the way. Those moments are what get you through college, but why is college only about “getting through?”

 Because our degrees are social capital that tell society we did a lot of shit and are thus able to take a lot of shit. Nobody actually cares about what we learned, about our humanity, about any of that, they care about our ability to work hard and advance the agenda of whoever we are working for and our ability to fit into the system of work that becomes a blur of existence the minute we assimilate to it. 

This is a systemic issue related to our culture of expectations and overt assimilation to what is expected of us or what we think we need to do to achieve success and happiness in our society, which is then tied to how we define that success, personal achievement, and happiness. I don’t blame anybody for buying into that, because it is legitimately how our society is structured, but I do leave college feeling hopeless that this is the culture I have to look forward to. 

In college, we are still being shaped to the parasitic undertones of what success is–abject hard work, blind commitment, and infrequent time to pause, reflect, genuinely engage with what we are learning, and, gasp, to rest. While college gave me a platform, that platform was only a minimal part of my actual educational journey. Perhaps it was bait. 

As college students we are expected to endure and accept overwhelming amounts of work–because college is fundamentally about learning how to operate and thrive under extreme pressure and responsibilities and how to sink under that pressure constructively (antidepressants, just enough money and capital to make it seem like we are achieving and are happy, and enough exhaustion to make us really not even care to argue or buck against the trend), not actually engaging with a curation of topics we find interesting. College, then, is simply preparation and trimming of our minds and spirits for the world we are about to step into. 

So while I leave college grateful for what I have learned, I also leave feeling like I was just another perpetuation of a broken hierarchical system that operates in the back pocket of capitalist ideology and the sentiment that we are born and bred to work, to compete, and to do whatever is necessary to ourselves and to others to “succeed.”

 I don’t blame this on professors; I don’t blame this on students,;I don’t blame this on anyone except those who founded the system. But those people are gone; the system is now entrenched, and so then now it is up to us as students, as professors, as people who should have a relationship with ourselves, the world, other people, and our learning–who should really care about the things we brush off as normal or “part of a process”– to change that system. Perhaps our success doesn’t hinge on it–after all, we spent 16 years being taught how to “succeed”–but our humanity certainly does.