QOTD (2010-09-01) 1 September 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, QOTD.add a comment
In honor of the advent of September and the encroaching end of summer, here is an opinion column by “Mc.” in The Princetonian (then biweekly, not daily), June 21, 1877, entitled “Summer Vacation”:
The realization of freedom from all College discipline, from recitations and lectures, is indeed pleasant. But how can we spend our vacation, while refraining from any severe course of study, yet not absolutely wasting our time? The question comes home to each one of us. We err just as much in pursuing a laborious course of study as in passing the Summer in idleness, else vacation would not be vacation. Hence we see that a medium is desirable. Perhaps we can attain that medium no better than in a study of Nature. If we are in the mountains or at the sea shore, the great beauties of Nature, in animal or vegetable life, are exposed to our gaze and invite our closer attention. If we have been studying Botany, in rather a theoretical manner here, supplement it in a practical way there. The satisfaction will be great, and what has seemed nothing but dry nomenclature, will there become a living science.
Most of us content ourselves with admiring a beautiful sunset, or a pleasing landscape, while a deeper scrutiny of Nature would bring to light objects less grand, it may be, but more beautiful in their minuteness and perfection of arangement.
As we choose food that is palatable, so let us take exercise that is pleasant and at the same time instructive.
Again, all expect to do some reading, but care should be taken in our selections. It is doubtful if a Summer given up to a perusal, or rather study, of History, is beneficial. The hot days are not conducive to the proper reading of such heavy matter, and careless reading insures no long remembrance of what is read. Of course, some Histories are exceptions, as those of Macaulay or Motley, for in these the events are not mere facts of the past, but living actualities. We think, however, that we could profitably devote our Summer to the lighter literature and our best fiction. A method is necessary, and if we read Geo. Eliot or Thackeray, we must do it intelligently and comparatively. A good test of our reading is our ability to express our opinion on the success or failure of the author’s character-drawing; and to this end, it is well, after having read a series or volume of an author, to write out our opinion of the work. This aids our faculties of reasoning, of perception and of memory. A Summer well spent will repay us, and we will return with a consciousness of not having wasted three months.
In my defense, I would like to note that it’s been rather cool in the place where I’ve spent the bulk of the summer, thus rendering the point about reading history moot. But “a consciousness of not having wasted three months”? Definitely still looking for that.
The Prince have recently digitized their archives, which hare a total joy to pore over—the rest of the June 21, 1877 issue is filled with questions about how much Princeton should aim to imitate Oxford and Cambridge, and about whether the university culture is sufficiently religious and whether having a religious culture is a good thing. The prose seems more similar to the work of Oxford undergrads from the same period which I’ve been reading than it does to the modern Princeton literary/journalistic scene. (This is probably not all that surprising, but I sometimes forget how strikingly Anglo 19th-century American university culture was.) Definitely worth a look if you have a few minutes—or hours.
The Trauma of Theory: A Cautionary Tale 30 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Cultural Criticism, Personal Life, Princeton.1 comment so far
I had my first run-in with literary theory in the spring of my freshman year. I was halfway through my first college English class and thought I knew everything; I figured that because I’d read Paradise Lost and was increasingly able to follow along when I heard graduate students talk about their work, I’d be able to listen to a faculty member I knew give a paper on a panel concerning a topic in which I was interested, and know when to smile and nod. I let some people talk me into attending this panel, and I knocked off my work-study job to stand in the back of an overflowing auditorium, full of optimism and full of myself.
And boy, was I sure mistaken. Not only did I not understand the poem the speaker was discussing when she passed around photocopies of it; I didn’t understand a single word she said about it. I don’t remember, today, what the title of the talk was, or what argument she might have said she was intending to make; I only remember blank incomprehension, and confusion, and shame. I remember becoming increasingly worried and upset as I failed to grasp anything, failed to understand why what the speaker was saying was important to an understanding of the poem, failed to nod or chuckle with the rest of the audience. I ducked out before the end of the panel, too ashamed of my lack of understanding to drink the coffee, pick over the fruit tray, and say hi to the people in the audience whom I knew. I went home and cried. Though surely no one in the audience even noticed me, much less knew how confused I was, I felt as if I’d been exposed as a pretentious fool, and I realized how ridiculous I’d been to think that half a semester of intro lit could have prepared me for the rigors of professional literary criticism, or indeed the realities of the professional academic world. A few English classes and theory talks later, I have learned enough to watch the people in the audience whom I think are clever and nod when they nod; I have learned to stay for the fruit tray and let myself be introduced to people no doubt wondering what this awkward undergrad was doing at their talk; every so often I can grab hold of a sentence out of the paper which relates to something I’ve read or learned from a class, something which reminds me that the speaker isn’t talking in a foreign language after all. And I have come to accept that, as an undergrad, as not even an English major, as someone of merely average intellect who hasn’t read the theorists the academics make use of in their talks, there is no reason why I should understand the strange language they speak, their inscrutable methods of making sense out of a text which to the uninitiated sound quite all Greek (or perhaps all French, given the context, except that I actually do understand French, and what they say doesn’t sound like any of the French I know). Even if I can cope, now, with this incomprehension—enough to keep masochistically putting myself through the routine, in the hopes that someday I will understand—that afternoon at that first panel remains one of the most frightening and embarrassing moments of the first half of my undergraduate career. For someone such as me whose sense of self-worth is rooted nearly entirely in the degree to which she’s taken seriously by professional academics, there is nothing quite so awful as it being so matter-of-factly demonstrated to you what an outsider you are.
I was reminded of this episode today not only because, with twelve days to go until I’m back on campus, I can think of nothing other than the academic world; but because I read Adam Kirsch’s brief obit of Frank Kermode in Slate. Kermode is one of the people whose name has entered my sphere of awareness through the academic conversations on which I habitually eavesdrop; like so many such names, I’ve never actually read his work, a fact which, like it does with so many other such names, never fails to produce a distinct feeling of shame. The point, however, is that I can’t comment on Kermode’s views of the state of literary criticism today except through Kirsch’s interpretation of them, which will no doubt expose me as a charlatan far more obviously than my failure to understand theory talks does; however, what Kirsch says does have some bearing on that very problem of failure to understand theory talks. According to Kirsch, Kermode expressed considerable concern about the inaccessibility and hyperspecialization of literary theory, and the modern habit of scholars of literature of keeping the public (like me) unable to understand what it is they do—due, I suppose, to their reliance on a particularly inscrutable and difficult set of secondary literature. Kirsch pays tribute to Kermode’s status as a consummate generalist and a popular critic in the London Review of Books (which he helped to found) and other publications, labeling this manner of practicing lit crit a dying breed in favorable contrast to the theorists.
And, well, it’s difficult not to sympathize with this perspective. As cognizant as I am that my failure to understand theory is probably due either to my own stupidity or my lack of initiative at studying on my own the fundamental theory texts which would help my understanding of that world, I must to some extent think that the sense of alienation I feel isn’t entirely my fault. I’ve taken a number of English classes for someone who isn’t a major, have dabbled in theory, have done my best to understand what it is my friends and my colleagues in my sister department do. And I have come to believe in the relevance of theory to understanding our world: when it’s explained in a simplistic way for undergrads to understand, I’ve gotten excited by it; I’ve seen firsthand the transformative power of, for example, queer theory on a queer person’s understanding of hirself and the world, and that’s a good thing. But I do find myself agreeing with Kirsch (and perhaps Kermode, though as I said, I don’t have a good sense of how much Kirsch is quoting Kermode, and how much he’s offering his own take) that what the academic practice of literary criticism and theory so insulates itself from the world of people who don’t have advanced degrees in the subject, we have a serious cultural problem which matters a great deal.
But why does it matter so much? After all, one Ivy-League-brat-with-self-esteem-issues’ self-absorbed feelings of alienation are probably not that important in the scheme of things. Recasting the language of literary criticism such that someone who hasn’t read a single post-structuralist could still engage with the process of thinking about literature won’t help to eliminate world poverty and hunger or stop global warming or bring relief to the flood victims in Pakistan. But a citizenry which sees the practice of humanistic inquiry as part of its time could restore reason and civility to the political sphere. It could find in itself a desire to reinvest in education and the arts in the name of the next generation. It could, regardless of whether there is such a thing as narrative or such a thing as reality or such a thing as authorial intent, become interested in scrutinizing the claims of politicians and pundits who take even more fast-and-furious approaches to Truth than do literary critics. Because, see, the fact is that we need the humanities. The practice of the close study of texts makes us better citizens, better thinkers, perhaps even better people. But if that study is not just hidden in an ivory tower, but hidden behind a wall of words, it’s going to be very difficult indeed to make the case for its survival to a public which cannot understand what it is that humanists do.
Of course, it would be lovely if we lived in a world in which people said, “I do not have the knowledge or cultural capital to understand your work or the culture in which it exists, and yet I will take your word for its importance.” But, as we all know by reading daily news which attests to the systematic defunding and vocationalizing of higher education, this is not the world in which we live. We live in a world in which intellectual culture must be rigorously defended as a good in itself, and in which a discourse which can bridge the gap between the closed circle of the academic conference panel and the larger western culture of anti-intellectualism is yet to be outlined. In order to do this, it seems to me as if it is necessary to rethink academic culture into something which is not dedicated to separating insiders from outsiders, and to rethink literary studies in particular into something which does not reward mere inscrutability and punish and induce shame in those who are not members of the club. This is not to say that theory has no place in the practice of understanding the world and its texts (or films, or music, or art, or culture), but rather simply to point out how difficult it will be to make a case for the humanities going forward, if the Frank Kermodes of this world really are such a dying breed. We have our work cut out for us—and I especially. Not only do I feel as if I need to begin to consider what it means to belong to the next generation of humanists still in the process of learning what it means to be engaged in this project of understanding the world through its texts; I need also, I feel, to do the reading and listening necessary such that I can loiter unseen in the back of an auditorium, listen to a scholar speak, and not feel quite so hopelessly, shamefully left out of a culture in which I want so desperately to be taken seriously and to belong. Once I feel I have moved beyond the stage of twenty-year-old charlatan, perhaps I can start to articulate a humanism I can call my own—but is it too much to ask that the theorists should meet me halfway?
QOTD (2010-08-25) 25 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, QOTD.add a comment
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s speech at the Gracie Mansion iftar brought tears to my eyes:
A few quotes worth highlighting:
Islam did not attack the World Trade Center. Al-Qaeda did. To implicate all Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American. Today, we are not at war with Islam. We are at war with Al-Qaeda and other extremists who hate freedom.
Freedom and tolerance will always defeat tyranny and terrorism. And that’s the great lesson of the 20th century, and we must not abandon it here in the 21st.
This is a test of our commitment to American values, and we have to have the courage of our convictions. We must do what is right, not what is easy. We must put our faith in the freedoms that have sustained our great country for more than two hundred years.
There is nowhere in the five boroughs of New York City that is off-limit to any religion. And by affirming that basic idea, we will honor America’s values, and we will keep New York the most open, diverse, tolerant, and free city in the world.
This weekend is the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks are in the best tradition of spiritually compassionate calls for tolerance, equality, and civil liberties which Dr. King epitomized in 1963. This is an American rhetorical and ideological tradition stretching back through the abolitionists, through Jefferson, and across the continent, though there is an argument to be made that it is New York City which best represents this spirit of freedom and inclusion:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
I have devoted a lot of Facebook time these past couple weeks to promoting the voices of American freedom and acceptance which seek to put right the voices of misunderstanding which misguidedly believe that lower Manhattan is not the place for a Muslim community center. But you don’t have to be a politician whose words make it into a newspaper or onto YouTube to dispel intolerance—all you need to do is to remember that, from some vantage points in lower Manhattan—perhaps the top of the new Freedom Tower will be one of them—you can see the Statue of Liberty.
Daddy, What Did You Do in the Age of Late-Capitalist Decadence? or, Some Thoughts on Cultural Criticism for a New Generation of Mad Men 24 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Cultural Criticism.1 comment so far
A few weeks ago, my former Campus Progress colleague Ned wrote a blog post which he titled, “The Left’s Poverty of Good Cultural Criticism.” I commented on the post in a state of some bemusement: after all, I waste vast quantities of time reading a lot of very good cultural criticism coming more-or-less from the left on a weekly basis. What do the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Observer, Harper’s, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Village Voice, the Paris Review and countless other publications do, after all, if not showcase the best of popular left-leaning criticism in the U.S. and Britain today?
It seemed to turn out, however, that Ned and I were disagreeing at cross-purposes. Ned’s post was spurred by his dissatisfaction with criticism of the TV show Mad Men, which he and others of my generation of writers/journalists find narrowly focused on the show’s historical accuracy at the expense of more literary criticism of its narrative, its character development, etc. Now, Mad Men is not a show which interests me; I stopped following it partway through the first season, and so haven’t read much of the discussion of the show which proliferates on the Internet. But Ned’s and others’ objections to that discussion, irrespective of the rest of the state of modern general-audience cultural criticism, leads me to wonder if there might possibly be a generation gap at work here. Sean Wilentz’s forthcoming book on Bob Dylan, for example, while promising to be a masterful piece of cultural, musical, and historical writing, seems as if it will speak primarily to those who have inhabited a certain set of historical moments beyond the ken of those of us in our early twenties. Prof. Wilentz’s book will serve an educative purpose to we GenY-ers, not entirely dissimilar to what we might get out of the late Tony Judt’s series of memoirs for the NYRB, or a Paris Review author interview. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but these are the sorts of writing I will read for their specifically educative purpose: they inform me about a middle-to-highbrow intellectual culture in which I am neither old enough nor educated enough nor sophisticated enough to participate, and they stand apart from, say, the Guardian’s attempt to explain Katy Perry to its readers, or particularly last week’s NYT Magazine article about “emerging adults”—that is, us. Those of us who are still in college or have recently graduated from it, who don’t have the critical soapboxes our elders do, turn to the culture pages of newspapers and magazines to find our elders helpfully explaining to us the cultural world of their youth and young adulthood, or striving to explain the lifestyles and cultural touchstones of a new generation of young adults in ways which can unfortunately wind up merely alienating those very same young adults, so sure are we that those of our parents’ generation have fatally misunderstood our world.
I am inclined to think that these generational gaps are at times overstated, because I am firmly wedded to the belief that culture moves in cycles; I also believe that by striving to understand the cultural context of previous generations, we can help them to understand ours. I am also pretentious, and a bit retro, and perhaps I myself live in too much of a bubble to really engage with the cultural context of my generation and see why members of our parents’ generation might not be getting it. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see why the perspective of someone who lived through the era which Mad Men aims and claims to depict might have a very different reaction to it than someone slightly younger who grew up when identity politics and the culture wars were at their height; and that someone my age, reaching adulthood in a cultural context which aims both to synthesize and to reject entirely these two preceding milieux might find frustrating a reading of Mad Men which focuses predominantly, say, on the show as a concretized version of memory; or on the race, class, gender, and sexuality politics of the show’s world; or even on the classical Marxist critique which I think the show most desperately demands. It’s not difficult to see, I think, that any of these frameworks might be unwelcome in the eyes of a younger generation of critics—a generation which learned historicist, Marxist, feminist, queer, etc. critical methodologies in its English or philosophy or gender studies or cultural studies classes in college, and is understandably looking to find its own critical stamp to leave on the popular culture—the online meritocracy making this a more urgent task, since none of us require entrée into academe to need or to want to do this.
What, however, would such a critical stamp look like? I have to confess that I’ve no idea—perhaps I am too much of a historian-in-training, and too much of a traditionalist, to be the person to consider this. My attempts to engage with criticism of the popular culture have not really departed dramatically from the techniques I’ve learned in my classes; my own ideas for an article to submit to my Journal of Popular Gaga Studies don’t particularly deviate from the much-trodden ground of a standard queer-theory framework. I know, as I lightly said to a friend when ze told me that ze was confused about hir sexual orientation (gender-neutral pronouns to preserve confidentiality ftw!), that we’re all supposed to be post-labels nowadays. But I’m not sure what that means, actually—other than an apparent lack of interest in devoting one’s discussion of Mad Men entirely to its gender politics.
Whatever form this post-labels, forward-thinking criticism takes, however, I hope that it will only shape itself after due consideration of its predecessors, of history, and of the culture highbrow as well as popular. I hope that it will be shaped by young critics who read, in addition to blogs and Twitter, the NYRB as well as Rolling Stone, and I hope that it will prove capable of engaging with written as well as visual media. I also, as always, hope that it will do its work both inside and outside the academy. My generation presently bears the burden of forging a new intellectual left which can grapple with the problems which presently plague our states, our communities, and our cultures, and it can do that neither solely from within the ivory tower nor without the ivory tower’s help at all. I hope, too, that out of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of undereducated idiots like me writing blog posts about Criticism as if we know what we are talking about (news flash: we don’t), the media circus will find it within itself to highlight views considered and informed rather than sensationalist and needlessly polemic.
Yesterday, I finished reading Tony Judt’s valedictory book, Ill Fares the Land, and so I find myself thinking about these matters of generational succession, and of the task now set before we “emerging adults” to create not just the political, social, and economic, but also the cultural and intellectual world we want to live in. Perhaps this was not at all the intended takeaway of Ned’s post about Mad Men, but I find myself thinking, this morning, that we can and should listen to the advice of our elders—about how to rebuild social democracy, or about how to watch a television show. Before too long, however, this will be our world, and so more importantly we must begin to build the intellectual framework which will best allow us to take our place in running it. As to how to do this? Well, I certainly hope the strategies will evolve organically, because I don’t think it’s a question any number of years of higher education, or any number of vote-with-your-mouse pageviews, could answer.
A Word From Your Friendly Neighborhood Peer Academic Advisor 23 August 2010
Posted by Emily in Blog, Nerdiness, Princeton.add a comment
As I spend more time reading the professorial blogosphere, I find myself more frequently tempted to comment on academic questions I, as a college junior, am far underqualified to have an opinion about. I may be awfully opinionated, but you should probably listen to the professionals if you actually want to learn anything useful about life in the academy. That said, though, I was just barely, bureaucratically ineligible from becoming a peer academic adviser for freshmen in my college this year, and I have plenty of thoughts about what I did right and wrong in my first two years of university that may be worth sharing with my now-nonexistent advisees.
In the spirit of Historiann’s recent post about undergrad satisfaction and regrets, Tenured Radical’s advice to faculty academic advisors (no, I still don’t know whether “advisors” or “advisers” is correct, so I’m using both), and the multiple letters I’ve already gotten this summer from frosh and sophomores who want some advice on choosing classes; and in order to offer a more constructive tone than that of my whiny distribution requirements post of a couple weeks ago, I offer here some thoughts directed at first- and second-year university students trying to navigate a new academic world. These thoughts are probably better-suited to academically serious students for whom college is more about learning and intellectual development than it is about anything else (not to say that’s what college has to be; some students feel that way and some don’t), but I don’t see why it shouldn’t apply to anyone concerned about making the right choices and learning to decipher academia.
Listen to the experts. As Tenured Radical indicated in her post, the online rumor-mill is of limited use in determining which classes to take, especially if you’re looking for good classes and not just easy or fun ones. But many’s the time I’ve ignored the advice of a professor or grad student who knew me, knew the person teaching the class, and knew that I wouldn’t find the professor or the material a good fit for me. Work on politely phrasing questions such that you can ask a professor not what she thinks of her colleague’s teaching, but whether her colleague’s class would be a good fit for you. And if she says it wouldn’t, pay good attention to that recommendation.
Keep an eye out for professors’ names. Often I’ll ask frosh who’s teaching a particular class, and they’ll say they’ve forgotten the professor’s name. But a class taught by a fantastic professor, even if its topic is outside your immediate area of interest, is a better use of your time than a class in your area of interest taught by an unremarkable professor, and so it’s advisable to remember those names. This is where listening to the experts comes in, as some sources on who the best professors are will be more reliable than others. If you’re torn between the professor and the subject matter, take the professor every time. And be aware that a lot of different people teach, e.g., Victorian literature, or the American history survey, or SOC 101, and you might want to wait to take the class until the best professor is teaching it.
Be careful about what you can handle. Starker than the social divide between undergrads and “sketchy” grad students is the divide between the humanities and the sciences. If you’re a humanities major like me, you probably grew up thinking that as a “humanities person,” you couldn’t possibly be any good at math or science. You may have picked your first semester’s courses thinking that since your SAT math score was on the low side, you couldn’t possibly handle a college-level quantitative class, and so you decided to sign up for the easiest quantitative class in the whole university, a computer science class whose syllabus explained quite clearly that it was going to repeat a lot of material you’d already learned in high-school computer science. (This may or may not have happened to me.) That syllabus, dear frosh, is a good indication that you’re not going to learn anything from the class, and that you should consider taking one which will teach some new concepts.
This is not to say, however, that you need to choose the most challenging thing in all areas outside the ones in which you’re confident. To fulfill my lab science requirement, I took physical anthropology and environmental science: not taxing in the same way university-level physics or chemistry is, but nevertheless useful, interesting, and well-taught, and therefore not a waste of time. If, when you’re honest with yourself, it seems that it would take more work to pass intro physics than it would to get an A in your required departmental seminar, it’s probably best to leave yourself the time to get the A in your required departmental seminar.
Plan ahead. It’s probably just a tad neurotic to make a plan for what you’re going to take every semester for the next four years (which is not to say that I haven’t done it…), but you’ll find that it will benefit you to think farther ahead than the next semester. By the time you’re halfway through college, the number of course slots you have left will start to look increasingly finite (especially if, like me, you’re planning on a semester abroad), and you’ll find yourself having to make difficult choices between queer theory and colonial American history, or suddenly realizing that the course you’ve wanted to take since you sent in your matriculation forms is only offered in one of your four years. It might be worth looking through the course catalog, making a list of all the classes you feel as if you can’t possibly graduate without taking, and keeping an eye out for those titles every semester.
Start a new language. Obviously if you’re an engineer or premed or have three majors this is more tricky, but college is really the best time in your life to start a language you missed when you were young, and I regret only continuing the ones I began in junior high and high school. You may want to think about which new language will help you most in your future areas of academic or professional interest, but studying a language for which you can’t see any possible “use” is still worth it, and is “useful” for its own sake; I really regret chickening out of starting ancient Greek. Which brings me to my next point:
College doesn’t have to be vocational school. College students seem increasingly to be thinking of their bachelor’s degrees as discipline-specific professional credentials which will prepare them for specific career paths, or which just sound vocational (first-years of the world, academic economics is not the same thing as business or accounting!). There’s nothing inherently wrong in this, but you should know that there’s no reason to feel pressured to study something “useful” or something which has the same name as a profession. Not only can you certainly have any kind of successful professional life with an undergrad degree in any field, but studying what you love is important in and of itself. You should figure out which classes you enjoy the most and find most intellectually stimulating, and then continue to take those classes. You’ve got enough time to develop a career—right now, it’s time to learn how to think, and how to love to think.
This goes doubly for grad-school-bound kids. Just because you’re majoring in a not-usually-vocational subject doesn’t mean you can’t make it vocational by locking yourself into a path focused solely on grad school admissions and on making preparations to succeed in the professional world of academia. Your professors can advise you on what you need to do now to be prepared for grad school (and indeed whether you should apply at all), but it doesn’t hurt to distinguish undergrad from the rest of your life. Your undergraduate thesis is not a dissertation, your A- in a departmental seminar will not sabotage your chances of getting into a top program, and trying out courses across the curriculum won’t prevent you from being good at your intended field of study. You’ve got 5-10 years in grad school to become a specialist and to lose sleep over the job market; undergrad is not the right time.
Try out possible majors early. If your system is like the one at my school and you have to declare a major the spring of your sophomore year, you’ll probably want to take introductory/survey lectures in a variety of different departments your first few semesters. In terms of figuring out what you want to learn about for the next few years and possibly longer, doing this kind of exploration is more important than knocking out core-curriculum requirements just for the sake of knocking out requirements. While I regret some choices I made in my requirement-juggling, pushing the philosophy and science requirements till junior and senior years in order to try out sociology and English was not one of them. By taking sociology early on, I avoided making a terrible mistake when I discovered that I actually don’t like data; by taking English early on, I found a second home which has enriched my study of history in countless ways. And, indeed, don’t just stick to intro classes: by making time in my freshman-year schedule for an upper-division history course, I came in through a back door which got me much more enthusiastic about the discipline than subsequent more intro-level courses have.
However, there’s no need to take this selection process too seriously: your undergrad major does not determine the rest of your life. As per the comments about vocational education above, your undergrad major will probably have very little impact on what you do as an adult, even if you’re grad-school-bound. I know so many academics who have changed fields, it’s not funny—so study what you want to study right now, and let the rest follow.
Be skeptical about all-freshman programs. Your university is probably selling you a line about the “first-year experience,” and about how rewarding taking a freshman seminar would be, but I’ll be frank: a class entirely populated by first-years isn’t going to challenge you very much. This is not to say that just because you’re an academically serious student you’ll be better at college than everyone else in the class, but taking a lot of all-freshmen classes, while less scary than being in classes with mostly older students, can limit your opportunities to seek out mentors among the older undergrads and grad students who, in my experience, will make the difference in your undergraduate education.
The bright side of special small classes for first-years, particularly if you’re in a field or at a university which doesn’t otherwise offer a lot of small seminars, is that they can get you in contact with faculty early on, which is much harder to achieve in intro lectures with hundreds of students. I became a research assistant for the professor of the freshman seminar I took my first spring. Helping him do archival research and organize his primary sources that summer not only convinced me I wanted to be a historian and, practically speaking, taught me a lot more about research skills than I’d gotten in my classes so far; it also gave me a lasting mentor on the faculty. Such opportunities are not to be sneezed at, and can be worth 12-15 weeks of not learning a whole lot from your classmates.
Only compare yourself to yourself. In my first year I wasted hours sobbing to myself about whether my comments in class discussion were as clever as my prep school-educated classmates’, or whether I deserved to be at Princeton even though I couldn’t reference as many post-structuralists in casual conversation as some of my more pretentious classmates could. But I’ve learned not to worry: when professors evaluate your work, they’re not doing so on the basis of how frequently you can name-drop Lacan. As a first- or second-year, you cannot expect yourself to be as well-versed in disciplinary methodology or jargon as older students who have been in your department for a couple years and have done a lot more work in the discipline. Just make sure that you’re consistently putting in the most effort and turning in the best work that you can sanely manage, ignore the students who are obviously just bullshitting, and allow the ones who really know what they’re talking about to teach you how to talk the talk of a budding historian, or whatever it is you should happen to be.
Have fun, but carefully. For the academically serious student, a creative non-fiction writing workshop is a good “fun” class, and a worthwhile addition to your schedule. A 450-person children’s literature lecture largely populated by jocky fraternity and sorority members who spend the entire lecture talking about their upcoming rager may be more frustrating than “fun.” (I’ve done both.) It’s not wise to take only the most challenging classes, especially if you’re taking more than the required number of courses/credits; you’ll burn out. An arts class in which you turn in a painting or a performance can be a much-needed change from a barrage of 8-10-page analytic essays. But “easy” and “fun” are very different things. You’ll regret “easy” halfway through the semester when you’re in discussion section, no one’s done enough of the reading to have a conversation, everyone’s checking Facebook on their phones, and the poor instructor has long since given up holding the entire class’s attention. You’ll find yourself wanting to check Facebook, too, and let me tell you: it’s all downhill from there. If you’re uncertain about whether a class will be “easy” or “fun,” ask for advice.
And the moral of the story is…
Talk to adults. When you start college, you’re still a kid. You think the way you were taught to think in high school; you’re unused to making decisions (whether academic or otherwise) for yourself; unless you’re an academic brat, you’re probably unfamiliar with the arcanities of academic culture. Obviously, this is not your fault; it’s just the way things are, and at times academia can be a bit too impenetrable for its own good. But your next four years will be a lot more pleasant if you can crack the system, and it’s faculty and staff members, graduate students, and older undergrads who can help you make this transition both to adulthood and to an academic community. If you’re an academically serious student, regardless of whether you want to spend your life in academia, I can guarantee you that your life will be changed and your worldview will be opened if you allow your path to cross with those of older friend-mentors. Visit office hours. Accept dinner, lunch, and coffee invitations. (In my first year, I declined a coffee invitation from a grad student. I was shy and hadn’t yet figured out the social rules of meeting people for coffee, and that he was being friendly, not creepy. He could have been my friend, and I regret it to this day.) If you go to the sort of school where grown-ups eat in your dining hall and grad students and faculty members live in your residential system, sit down at their tables or knock on their doors. (If you don’t go to this kind of university, it’s certainly more difficult to meet grown-ups, but I’m given to understand it’s not impossible.) Ask them about your courses, but also talk to them about the books you’re reading, the things you’ve seen in the news, the brave new world you’re just beginning to puzzle through. Ask them about their work: you might discover a new area of interest. It’s not every four years that you’ll get the chance to live in a community populated by people in all different stages of life and intellectual development, and this is the most valuable thing you can get out of college. It certainly has made all the difference to my undergraduate education.
In fact, I think Tenured Radical’s academic-advising post made this point most effectively:
Needless to say, I made some spectacular errors in that first two years and had some great successes, all of which had to do with the opportunities and pitfalls of a large university. Would things have been different with a more attentive advisor? I doubt it. It wasn’t until, entirely by accident, I fell in with a group of graduate students and became invested in being regarded as — not a good student, but scholarly — that things straightened out for me.
This is actually the story of my life, so I feel qualified to endorse the strategy of seeking out mentors and not worrying too much about whether you’ve correctly distinguished one core requirement from another. Focus on having the time of your intellectual life and allowing your world to be opened and changed, and the rest will follow.
And dear readers, if you have any of your own advice for the Class of 2014, do leave it in the comments!
