Do It Yourself Education

The problem with my attempts to write personal journal entries is that nobody comments on them...

So, I graduated a little while ago and, in the midst of looking for a job (but not too hard) and trying to help around the house (but not too much) and catching up on some of the reading I've meant to do for quarters (or years), I've found myself thinking about graduation. I heard a lot of speeches over graduation weekend — about what we'd get from college, what would last after we'd forgotten all our classes, whether commencement was really a beginning, or really an ending, or really a transition, or really a continuation, or really a moment. (That last was our valedictorian. He also talked about getting Philly Cheese Steaks from the cafeteria and I didn't get what he meant by that either.) It came to a lot of words, and none of them really got close to what I was feeling, or, as a result, meant that much to me.

It is, though, tied to a couple of incidents from my last couple of quarters. One was a conversation with an 07 friend who was rather concerned about her department not offering any of the courses that tied into her concentration when she could take them. I didn't have much to offer her — besides sympathy, being a functional programmer in a department that wouldn't give a rat's ass for functional programming myself — but it reminded me of something of a common problem at D (and, I imagine, most other small schools). During my freshman year, and I suspect this true for most people, it seems like the entire world is available. Professors are nice and supportive, the course catalog is enormous, and every class is full of excitement. As time goes on, it turns out that the course catalog actually contains very little of what you're really interested in, and all the professors would be happy to support you doing whatever you're really interested in, but it's not really their area.

The story ended well for me. Even though my department fired the only programming languages professor my junior year, I found an emeritus professor whose interests matched closely with mine, and managed to have quite an enjoyable time researching and writing my thesis with him. I hope (and believe, actually) that things will probably go as well for my 07 friend. It certainly wasn't as smooth as it could have been, though, and I doubt it will be for her either. It really helps to be willing to do a lot of the footwork yourself.

The next incident starts with two things. First, I'd gotten a reputation (don't need to talk about what kind) around the theater department as a lighting designer. Second, the hip-hop dance group on campus, named SHEBA, lost their lighting person the week before their big spring show. As a result, I spent one Sunday near the end of Spring term standing in front of the biggest set of speakers I've ever seen, running a lights board and attempting to improvise lights for a dance show I'd never seen before. I think it ended up well — or at least no one in the audience knew enough to notice the places I fucked up — but I was left wondering why the most talented dance group on campus (at least the most talented student-run dance group) was left in the basketball gym with a set of rented lights and "tech rehearsal" that consisted of a one hour frantic run when the hired help finally got around to setting up the lights (about two hours before the show was supposed to start). I've seen much, much less entertaining, interesting productions get full technical productions from the theater department; how did SHEBA fall through the cracks?

There are lots of answers: SHEBA traditionally runs their spring show in the gym; there's more seating; the theater department already has more shows than it can manage; other things are higher on everyone's priority lists than a student organization with no (I think?) faculty oversight. The fact remains, though, that the show I was trying to keep up with and lighting in broad strokes (ooh! ORANGE!) could easily have made good use of technical capability the school had — but which just wasn't available.

I'm angling towards a point, I promise. In some sense, the freshman year impressions are all correct: the professors and staff at Dartmouth are all quite supportive (with some stunning exceptions), the course catalog really is quite large, and I think there are actually are pretty limitless possibilities. Unfortunately, it seems like relatively few of those opportunities come without a fair amount of, uh, creativity up front, and it's almost always possible to look back at something — anything — and find something that could have been done better, some opportunity that was missed. It's strange to look back at four years that I've described, honestly, as the best years of my life and mainly see regrets; I'm sure it would be possible to recognize that I'd done what I could and what I thought was the best thing to do at the time and to be satisfied with that, and there are times I wish that made sense to me.