College: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

My position as a writer of the university I attend is interesting at this point, since I’m reaching the point where I’m finishing my course load and will hopefully move on to graduate school. In a way I have to analyze the progress I’ve made within my writing during my undergrad and compare that to a graduate school standard. This is an interesting process, since graduate school isn’t something that everyone considers, especially in my field. I was once of the mind that getting a graduate degree in English would ultimately be useless and a waste of funds, but I have recently come to the decision that having two years of structured English workshops with other students who have similar aspirations to me could greatly help me. The differentiation between grad school and undergrad, and me as a writer in undergrad and me as a writer in grad school, is one that has been troubling me. Spellmeyer notes that sometimes the “principal function of public schooling [acts] as the inculcation of normative values and behaviors rather than the dispersal of knowledge.” Similarly, I feel that undergrad helped reinforce similar normative values into me, as a writer of and in the university. The workshops I’ve attended have all given me the basic tools to be able to write at an acceptable level. I’ve studied works by major authors and poets and have learned how to study and analyze them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s all very normative. In my mind, graduate school is a true dispersal of knowledge: once you get past learning the basics, as it were, you can achieve a true dispersal of knowledge by pushing yourself amongst a small number of people who have the same passions as yourself.

Undergrad is increasingly becoming unable to put people directly into the workforce directly out of graduation, which is one of the reason graduate school is also attractive to me. This dilemma is a topic that many of the people I’ve read this semester struggle with and is something I want to avoid altogether, since I doubt this is something that be fixed immediately. Berlin hopes that someday we’ll be able to “provide a college education that enables workers to be excellent communicators, quick and flexible learners, and cooperative collaborators.” It appears to me that above all, graduate school promotes this, rather than being a foolhardy attempt at trying to put students into the workforce, which is what undergrad appears to be very often to me and to others. Arguably, if graduate school can reinforce these ideals within a person without trying to hard to get them a low-level job in their field of study, than this is ultimately a more viable and successful option. My position as a writer in the university currently is one that sees me completing a benchmark for me as a writer that, while ultimately may be meaningless, is assigned importance in a college-focused culture.

While culturally important, and also still somewhat important personally, I’m aware that this is just the beginning of my growth as a writer and I’m excited to continue to grow and learn and be able to actively interact as a writer within the outer culture outside of undergrad.