By Margaret M. Treadwell
During the weeks when high school seniors make their final decisions regarding college versus whether to take a gap year or get a job, I had the opportunity to spend five days at Cornell University talking with students about their hopes, dreams and challenges, especially during freshman year. What was their greatest challenge or surprise? Could they have prepared themselves better before arriving on campus? In retrospect, was there anything they would have done differently during the first semester? When so much is written about sex, drugs and alcohol on college campuses, what keeps them sober and mature in their decisions?
Two women, one enrolled in the famed Hotel School and the second in pre-med, her family’s tradition, said they always had known what they wanted to do and where they wanted to go to do it. So the huge university, a city unto itself, was an easy transition that nevertheless constantly required an attention to “balance” – the greatest challenge for everyone I interviewed.
The majority of students explained how they floundered when they didn’t fit in right away. “If you can’t take a challenge you can’t make it at Cornell or probably any college,” said a second-semester freshman. His method of survival was to take time during the first weeks to determine what he wanted to do with his life at Cornell, all the while forming friendships to decide whom he wanted to be with. Then when he saw an opportunity to get involved, he plunged in with others he respected and liked. Now he’s so busy and committed that it requires organization through a color-coded Microsoft Outlook program to keep his balance.
An articulate young man said he wished he had taken a gap year to grow up and learn about himself before beginning his studies.
“If only I’d known that to be open doesn’t mean to be without a plan,” he said. “Had I created a clearer picture of what I wanted to do with my life, including a goal and direction, I would have been less disoriented. A direction would have allowed me to try things, change my mind and stop making decisions the exact opposite of my parents’ wishes for me. My reactivity to them wasted my time and energy, but I appreciate their letting me make my mistakes because I learned from them.”
Colleges have different personalities and everyone agreed that it’s important to know the “brand” and what suits and encourages you – size, school spirit, quiet or active campuses, the residential situation, social environment and how you want to live and relate to the community.
Kirsten Gabriel, associate director of The Cornell Commitment, says, “The world can be a bubble in college, and service work gives a different perspective about where you are and what you’ve been given. For example, students are inherently joyful, and half an hour talking with a chronically ill elderly person gives insight into their ability to give joy, which is empowering. They tell me that they stay on track, make their best grades, that life is full and rich when they are thinking beyond themselves by committing to the campus and community life.”
On the other hand, Dina Zemke, an assistant professor in the School of Hotel Administration, talked about students who spend class time on their Blackberries or computers. “They are masters at multi-tasking and communicating through technology, but I often wonder about the balance in their lives,” she said. “Something has to suffer, often academics, when a person is Jack of all trades, master of none.”
Differing views raise more questions, the most important being one a human being needs to ask for a lifetime and can only answer for him or herself: “What do you want to do with your life?” Although the question implies a singular answer, in fact late adolescent and early adult years offer a chance to try out many different ideas, interests and disciplines and to learn from mistakes.
Rainer Maria Rilke provides useful advice in his “Letters to a Young Poet (1903):
“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C, has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Dr. Edwin H. Friedman, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. She teaches a course on congregational leadership at Virginia Theological Seminary and creates and leads conferences across the country for bishops, clergy and church lay leaders, helping them to apply family systems concepts to their leadership in diocesan and parish ministry.