Choices, not Abilities

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It feels like college has flown by, even though I’ve already been here for more than two months now. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been here forever, even though I’ve been here for only two months. I don’t know which one is more representative. Perhaps both are accurate, dependent, of course, on the day you ask me.

I was reading on the ledge of Widener Library late one night at around 1am when a friend came up to me, asked how I was doing, and as our conversation progressed, he asked me this great question: how would you sum up college so far, in one word? I really couldn’t come up with a good answer, so I flipped the question back on him. He said ‘freefall.’ And I said the word that was on the tip of my tongue: ‘crossroads.’

Opportunities

One of the many privileges of attending a very generously endowed and highly selective college is that there are so many amazing opportunities for you to choose to dedicate your time to. And this, for a curious and ambitious young person, is an absolute intellectual haven. Our university attracts some of the most impressive people in every niche field one could imagine, from a Russian Orthodox bell ringing society to poker clubs, to courses in folklore and mythology, to the study of the Classics. It’s an incredible place to be, and I count my lucky stars for the opportunities I’ve been afforded and the energy I wake up to every day.

But when there’s so much cool stuff to do every day, you tend to get sucked in. You hear friends say they’re going to this really cool guest lecture, so you tag along, or there’s this club that everyone says is super hype, and at the same time there’s literally thousands of classes that all seem amazing and intellectually stimulating. And then you have your typical Friday nights where everyone goes out (but then you go out and realise it isn’t your vibe haha).

Nevertheless, FOMO is real. You get slapped in the face repeatedly, overwhelmed with opportunities and desires. Eventually, you reach the quintessential Harvard phase - the ‘rainbow GCal’. You’ve colour-coded your commitments so much to the extent that you’re scheduling in what time you’re going to eat, or shower, and your calendar appears as a kaleidoscope of activities, essential for you to even have a chance of organising your college life.

Then you look back in a few weeks or a couple months, and you realise all your old habits have more or less evaporated. You realise you haven’t been writing on your blog for months, or that you’ve been skipping the gym for all these cool opportunities, and you’ve lost your sense of adventure beyond the microcosm of the campus bubble. And you try to reach back for your old hobbies and pastimes, discarding those which you don’t feel as attracted to anymore. You reprioritise and reshuffle your life again - there are only 168 hours in a week, a third of which we need for sleep as well. You try to find your non-negotiables and follow those principles religiously to maintain a sense of who you are.

Identity

If anything, this place has been a reimagining of my identity, and I’d be inclined to hazard a guess that it has been for the majority of students here as well. When we apply to US colleges, it’s common to have a theme, niche, or direction in your application to show your passion for certain areas. And eventually you’re so clear with the strengths you’re presenting that you can summarise your application in one sentence, in a sort of ‘pseudo-identity.’ And then you come to college, having researched opportunities in your chosen niche, until you start hearing left and right about all this cool stuff going on - upon which you discard some old habits.

And don’t get me started on the macro opportunities. Concentration-wise, career-wise, hell, even summer-wise, there’s so much stuff you could be doing. But then you extrapolate even further. You realise that this is just a fact of life - that despite how hungry you are for knowledge, it would take you an absurd number of lifetimes dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge to even have a chance of learning a substantial amount. When I enter the ‘stacks’ of Widener Library (literally stacks and stacks of books - 92km worth over 10 levels), and when when I speak to professors who have literally dedicated their lives to the study of a particular niche, I realise how little I really know.

Crossroads

Pretty much everyone at elite US colleges is insanely ambitious, talented, and motivated. It’s a necessary condition for admission. But what I’ve recently become conscious of is that college is a crossroads of life. There are so many choices to make, and so many things to do. This is supplemented by the fact that most students here were also top performers, or ‘big dogs’ back in their home cities/countries. So when you bring together so many big dogs, you’re bound to create an interesting environment as well. Some will try to reach the elusive ‘big dog’ status here, and others feel like they no longer have to strictly ‘stand out’.

Is college just a part of life, or is it something all-consuming? Does one prioritise academics, pre-professional or social clubs, meeting new people and keeping up with old friends? How do you choose between physical, mental, and spiritual health?

I was told by a friend once, that Harvard is a buffet with everything you could ever want, and you should choose what seems most delicious to you.

On the day of our Commencement, the day before our first day of classes start, where all the first-year students and many of Harvard College’s leadership is congregated, Dean Rakesh Khurana advocated, in his speech, for students to consider taking a transformational, rather than a transactional approach to college. To explore those niche areas and find out what is intrinsically interesting and important to you, in doing so, transforming your identity, rather than treating things as a means, transactionally ‘getting something’ from college. This is really the only place where you have total intellectual freedom - there is likely no other time in your life where you can take niche, interesting deep dives into random topics, no questions asked.

That said, I’ve noticed that it’s so easy to take the easy path here. There’s a non-negligible number of students here who come in with big dreams, and end up taking the path of least resistance - regressing to the mean, if you will. Despite being washed with encouragement from many around us, some decide to index away from exploring, and take more mainstream, traditional paths, pursuing popular majors like Economics, joining pre-professional clubs, and aspiring to work in Finance/Consulting. These choices are obviously circumstantial, and there’s nothing wrong with these decisions. There’s also probably a non-zero chance that this will be a choice I end up making, but I do also think that this seems to contradict with the idea of exploration, pursuing one’s passions and interests - after all, these are students at an elite university with relatively high security and privilege (note - this is a pretty big generalisation). It seems hard to justify taking a more traditional route for fear of failure during one’s ‘exploration stage’, effectively staying in one’s comfort zone by taking an easier path, or perhaps for fear of socially ‘fitting in’ in the chase for external status.

At the end of the day, a friend of mine at a similar school on the West Coast described it aptly - that the fundamental issue we discussed here is the fear of responsibility and accountability for your choices. If you take an ‘easier’ path and don’t find success, you can blame the system, whereas if you fail while forging your own path, it’s entirely your own fault. My comments above are not so much a critique of choosing particular pathways, but rather critiquing a lack of independent thinking.

Despite this, I do think it is justifiable to take a more traditional path if you have extenuating circumstances financially or intrinsically have goals of financial success, or if you have genuine intellectual interest in your work, and you know where you're going with it. Or, I guess that if you have no idea what you’re doing, a more traditional path has a higher net-positive than wasting time with brainrot or otherwise.

Ends, not Means

I was chatting with another friend (also from the similar school on the West Coast), and we came a cross a concept that could be said to be attributed with Kant. There’s this idea of treating things as ends in themselves, instead of a means to an end. There are so many activities and choices one could make that are means to an end - for example, someone who has little interest in finance pursuing the field as a means to achieve higher social status, or a student pursuing a career in a big technology company as a means to make a large salary, which is another means to have more free time. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these approaches, but it’s important to be conscious of what you’re doing.

I look to my hobbies and classes - I used to fish frequently in Sydney, and Math and Latin take up most of my academic time here. Most people work their whole lives to go fishing when they retire, and I was lucky and privileged enough to find time to fish just for the sake of it.

But do these choices even matter that much? My parents back home always tell me to just pursue what’s interesting - feel secure knowing that if worst comes to worst, I’ll still have a great life. So instead, what matters is what you think is worth your time. I think my approach right now is to build strong intellectual foundations - wide and deep, so I can adapt and learn for the modern era and keep in touch with emerging technologies. A generalist approach. There is a caveat to this, though. Everyone in my Math class is concentrating in Math, ditto, my Latin class and Classics. I’m definitely among the least knowledgeable in both of them, and I’ve realised the need to let your ego take the back seat, listen more than you speak, and learn from those who know more than you.

Maybe I don’t need to optimise as much as I do. I can go with the flow, do what’s interesting, even challenging stuff if that’s what you want, and leave things there. Or maybe the solution is to work hard and play hard instead. If I take it too easy, I feel like I need to work. If I work too hard, I feel like I need to take it easy. It takes time to adjust, settle in, find out what works for you, and what’s most fulfilling, in doing so, reimagining your identity. Most of all, do things so that you’ll have no regrets, looking back.

I can’t think of a better word than ‘crossroads’ to define my coming of age experience, and I always come back to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter, wherein Albus Dumbledore says,

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Yurui

PS: there’s this beautiful article by MIT Admissions, called “Although of course you end up becoming yourself” by Chris Peterson. Do yourself a favour and read it.

“… for many students like him, is that there is no right answer, only different ones. His two options were both very good, but very different. He would be working with different people, toward a different goal, in a different place, and at a different age. As a result, he would, at the end of either program, emerge a different person. The question — the hard question — was which of those possible persons he wanted to be.

…

But we rarely confront this kind of choice so clearly, where it is self-evidently life-altering even as we contemplate it.

…

ask yourself: are these the kinds of people I want future-me to be like? Do they think like I want to think? Do what I want to do? Because, while you can never know for sure how any college will shape you, you can often infer a general sense of the mold by seeing how it has shaped others who were once like you. It’s as good a heuristic as anything else in this uncertain process; in this uncertain world.

…

From among the endless, infinite, impossible yous, you will, in time, become yourself; become, at least in this world, the only you that you could have ever really been.”