College Experience

It is Wednesday, muggy, warm, and overcast. Nevertheless, I am seated here before the computer in my favorite, hideous starry pajama and racer-back shirt with my hair pulled back in a stiff bun. I was late in my first class this morning - Business Communications. Thank goodness, Prof. Peralta only gave us an assignment and that is to write five business letter drafts, using five letter writing styles, all due tomorrow by hook or by crook.

Last night, while I was waiting for my brother to lend me the computer, I read an essay in my Booksale purchased book entitled College Pressures by William Zinsser. If you are a college student, like me, sipping your third cup of coffee for the day right at this moment, the you must read it. The essay is all about our generation's obsession to be on top of the academic ladder, our unending frustrations and anxieties. It is about the disturbing culture of college students and the unnerving conflict between the pressures of the our career dreams and our world’s desperation for substantial, curious, well-rounded people.

During Austen's time, university schooling is not about getting on the top of the academic chain, unlike to what's happening now. It is about pursuing your interest and passions. It is not about who will earn more, get rich when he finished his academic pursuits, but it was more of what he will contribute to our society. It is about students being good citizens, life-long learners and globally competetive individuals. The parental, economic, peer and self pressure is just overwhelming and they tend to destroy us more rather than build us up.

I am a college student and I am surrounded by very academically competitive peers, so I feel I’m somewhat qualified to have an opinion on the subject. Zinsser’s paper stretches me. It draws out a few tangled strings from my mind. It speaks to my soul. I know many of the pressures he cites. My parents put a lot of pressure on me. They want me to be a lawyer, for Pete's sake and I don't even want to be meddle with other people's quarrels in the first place. They only allowed me to take up a major in English because I've told them that it is a good preparatory for law. But my plans does not lead me anywhere near law school. Also, economic pressures, which is somehow related to parental pressure, remind us, the hard way, that college costs a lot and we better not waste the time and money we spend here. We better get on top, or forfeit the chance to pursue our passions in the next semester. But thank God, I've been blessed with a liberal reservoir of self-motivation. I wrestle with my own laziness and my own life stresses. I find the conjunction between living a meaningful, well-rounded life of curiosity and our culture’s way of achieving intellectual prowess.

I really want to know how our world can ask us to be good students with strong time management and critical thinking skills, how it expects us to be creative and inquisitive and well-rounded, and how it expects us to be emotionally disciplined and spiritually enriched, and physically competent– all at the same time. But we are not super beings, we are limited and this is why we cannot achieve all the things that pull our nerves apart.

The truth is that I like learning, I like thinking and growing, and I am increasingly inspired in class. I'm on my way though, and I love being in college. That is why I'm hanging on to my threads, because someday, all of these will be over and it will all make sense.

I better get moving. Have letters to draft, thesis to write and a poem to dissect.