Things I Suspect I May Have Learned In College
As I write this, I’m in that narrow pocket of time between the submission of my last required work as an undergraduate student, and the commencement ceremony that will more or less mark the end of my years of being somewhat sheltered from the amorphous and terrifying specter known as the Real World. Needless to say, I have been left with far too much time on my hands to contemplate what, ultimately, I have gained from my collegiate career.
In four years from now, there is little doubt in my mind that I will look back on this as the most asinine thing I’ve ever written. Nevertheless, a great deal of self-reflection and a couple beers have helped me distill my college learning into the following points:
1.) College really is about teaching you how to think.
No, I don’t mean that in the typical “they’re indoctrinating our children!” sense. Rather, I mean that college provides a meta-framework that gives you the building blocks to create your own framework for viewing the world. It’s great, because every year people graduate, a new class arrives, you get new roommates, and suddenly there is a penalty-free opportunity to reinvent your worldview and see if it makes more sense for interpreting the data around you.
The best professors I’ve had here haven’t just taught me a particular subject. They’ve taught me how to make up my own opinion on any given subject — how to do the research, find and weigh opposing viewpoints, and synthesize the new data into my framework. I’ve learned that I can take on projects in fields where I have limited practical experience, because once you learn how to frame the problem and effectively utilize resources, there is literally no problem you can’t solve. Literally.
2.) Tolerance doesn’t always mean what you think it means.
When I first came to Babson, I had a very myopic view of the world. When you live in the same small town for 18 straight years, and it’s all you know, I suppose you really couldn’t expect anything else. Still, my impression of the world was that everyone was out to prove that I was wrong somehow. Imagine my astonishment after having conversations about some of the most controversial topics — war, abortion, LGBT rights, religion, welfare, you name it — with people who disagreed with my point of view, but who still cared about me as a person regardless. I didn’t know that was possible. But ultimately I learned something from that: tolerance isn’t about forcing other people to accept your beliefs, or accepting beliefs that you disagree with. It’s about being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and say, “if I had the life experiences this person had, and was walking in their shoes, I’d probably have the same opinion they do now.” It’s amazing how a little empathy diffuses the emotional investment that we all put into our personal viewpoints, and makes it way easier to find common ground.
3.) Everyone can teach you something, and everyone has at least one character trait you should try to imitate.
There are some people who annoy me. There are some people who infuriate me. There are some people I’m incredibly impatient with. Some of them have been group members, some have been friends, some have just been people I’ve seen a lot. One thing that’s consistent, though, is their ability to surprise me by doing something awesome each time I try to mentally write them off as people I never want to interact with. It’s almost uncanny. I’m very much the kind of person who views things in black and white, so it’s been challenging for me to seek out the good in people sometimes. Every time I do, though, the rewards have been incredible. I just wish I’d started to do that sooner.
4.) Shut up until you know the facts.
Again, this is something I wish I’d started doing sooner. Babson is a pretty small community, and there are generally more rumors going around than we have squirrels on campus. Usually, the truth looks almost nothing like the rumor. I’ve almost lost track of the number of times I’ve looked like an idiot from repeating things I heard that I had to retract later, once I went to the actual source.
5.) Comfort zones are made to be broken out of.
I’m something of an introvert, to say the least. Large gatherings make me tired, and when I’m introduced to a new person, it’s like all coherent conversation topics are magically wiped out out of my brain. And having a crush on a girl? Well, let’s just say I’m rarely the one to make the first move… or any kind of move… ever. My strategy is generally to hope that she’ll randomly ask me to ask her out, or something along those lines.
At any rate, I cannot thank my Babson family enough for constantly pulling me out of my comfort zone. Even at my most socially awkward, you’ve been willing to hang out with me. If you’re reading this, and you’re affiliated with Babson in any way, then you have been directly involved in the process of shaping me as a person and giving me the confidence to unashamedly love cats, beards, and bacon. Though not necessarily in that order.
My point being, it’s incredibly enriching to join new groups, meet new people, and try new adventures. It’s very much like trying new foods. You may not like all of them, but you don’t know until you give them a chance.
6.) We define our own successes.
Secretly, I think everyone is terrified of failing. I don’t mean failing their courses here at Babson. I mean that the general human mindset is to avoid incomplete accomplishment of goals. Ultimately, even the decision not to go to college at all is an attempt to prevent failing, by redefining the boundaries of success so that by getting a minimum wage job and not landing in jail, one has achieved success.
However, what’s even more important to me at this stage in my life is that for the first time, success is no longer a construct that I can measure in absolute terms. Babson is an incredibly dynamic institution, but the end result of the game is clear: get a degree. All my activities can be defined in terms of their likelihood to help me achieve that goal. ROI and risk assessment are fairly trivial: skipping an exam to go to a bar in Boston has a concrete, measurable impact on my ability to achieve my goal.
That’s all over with. From now on, my success in life is whatever I want it to be, and if I don’t achieve it, I can only blame myself. There is no team of experts with hundreds of collective years of experience in higher education formulating a curriculum that, if I work hard enough within the specified parameters, will achieve a specified outcome in a specified number of years. Conversely, that means that the outcome can now be as far-reaching as I want to make it. Depending on my mood, it’s either the most depressing or most exhilarating thought ever. Either way, it leads to my next point:
7.) Life is about asking, “what’s next?”
As I said, life is about goals. Unless you have something you’re striving towards, existence quickly becomes a meaningless passage of time. People change, circumstances change, and the goals you have 20 years from now may be very different from the goals you have today. It doesn’t matter. Keep on striving onwards and upwards. If you’re satisfied with sitting in stasis, you’re doing it wrong. There will definitely be a lot of times where you don’t know “what’s next,” whether you’re talking about tomorrow or a year down the road. Just keep an open mind and an eye peeled for opportunities, and watch the world expand into a limitless array of exciting potentials.
8.) Leave a legacy.
How do you know when you’ve succeeded? When something you did or said makes a tangible difference in someone else’s life, after you’re no longer there to see or do it. Maybe you don’t leave behind a famous name — I highly doubt that the Class of 2019 will know who Matt Muller is — but I’m proud of the things I’ve done at Babson that will directly benefit them. Ultimately, I think that’s the ultimate lesson that I’ve distilled from my time at Babson: work to leave a legacy of doing good wherever you go, and success — scratch that, satisfaction — will follow.
Fellow graduates, I hope to see you leaving your legacies all over the world, for the rest of our lives.