Recently I’ve been spending three mornings a week tutoring in a fourth-grade classroom. The kids are energetic, goofy and imaginative, but what struck me the most the first time I met the students was that they were small. I have a lot of fond memories of being in fourth grade, and none of them include the fact that I was small, physically or otherwise. I guess once you’re near the top of the elementary school you start to feel a kind of importance that blinds you to the reality of your position in relation to the outside world.
In contrast, as a current college senior, I feel less significant than I imagined I would. I remember looking up to the seniors when I was a freshman, walking around campus with confidence, writing thesis papers and applying for jobs and seeming important and big. I’m now that senior and I’m still figuring things out. Maybe they were, too.
I imagine my 10-year-old self and remember thinking I was bigger than I once was, and I look at myself now and think I’m smaller than I once thought I would be. And I wonder…how did I get here?
Looking at the jump between fourth grade and senior year, it is easy to notice change but the gradual time in between is what I’ve lost track of. Those moments when you don’t notice anything is changing and then all of a sudden something is dramatically different.
This realization of gradual change becoming significant difference has been happening to me the most lately while studying with my friends or discussing our classes. When you do this in elementary school you’re always working on the same homework, reading the same books, and learning about the same experiments. Even during freshman year of college people are taking introductory classes like biology and microeconomics and you generally have an idea of what they’re learning. Things are different now. My friends are talking about price theory and ancient philosophy and my roommate is performing ovariectomies on rats. Another roommate is writing her geology thesis, and when I read the title of her research paper the only word I understood was “Alaska.”
Maybe this has been happening for a few years now, and I just haven’t noticed. But it seems to me like we’ve quickly moved from a state of mutual interest and understanding to a hundred different areas of curiosity and concern. I think it’s crazy, and also pretty cool. I’m impressed with our ability to follow distinct paths after spending so long on the same path together. I’m impressed with my friends who know things about things I’ve never even thought about. I realize now that this is only the beginning of our ventures into diverse territory, and that we will venture on whether we feel ready or not.
So, to my fellow college seniors, keep on doing things that nobody else understands. Find new fields to explore and enter them with confidence. We may never feel as big as we expect to, and may never feel as important as we think we need to be, but it hasn’t held us back before and shouldn’t in the future. And though we may not be sure how we got to where we are, I know that eventually, we’ll get going to wherever it is we need to be.
