A girl in black jeans and a beanie sat in front of me today. She was carrying a paper-mache head--soon to be a goblin--and a black backpack with some slight residue of glue. Her huge project struck me as odd enough to begin a conversation on, and after explaining the head for for 3D Design, I asked her how long she's been in our humble community college.
She said three years.
It was her fifth semester here, and after taking her generals, she planned on transferring to another school for a studio arts degree.
Of course, I had to ask the dreaded "what do you plan on doing with your degree?" Question. She, like many here, didn't know what to do. She even called herself a "slacker" for not narrowing down her major.
And ended our conversation with the professional yet overused "I'm still undecided" response.
Coming from a Mexican-American family, those three dreaded words sends me down the eternal loop of childish shame.
My mother studied in Mexico's UABC after her “prepa”* days were over before meeting my father and falling in love. In Mexico’s school system, you're essentially assigned a roll to live with for the rest of your life depending on your skill-set. From the moment you enter high school you're given a curriculum to stick with until you’ve got your degree and field.
"And none of that 'switching majors' thing!" My mother says with pride whenever she explains her time in school, most recently with the bank lady whom helped me open up my first account. Our lady was an immigrant herself, fluent in English and Spanish with a son in UC something or other. And her and my mother agreed on one thing: "I don't understand how it's done here in the United States! You're spending so much money and you're undecided?!"
With such a mindset, it isn't hard to understand the helicopter parent phenomenon: With such fleeting and uncertain life goals, it’s only logical to not leave their sides! Our children are still foolish and confused and need us around!
And it's partly true.
It's far too easy to get caught up in the financial matters and chose a major with the intention of making back the money spent to acquire it in a short period of time. Logically speaking, it should be the first goal of every new college student--find the jobs with demand and specialize in that!
The real question is, then, “why don't we?”
Complex questions deserve complex answers, do they not? We can search back to the very beginning of human history and find rebellious generation after rebellious generation and write it off as just that--someday, we will all assimilate back into the inevitable glow-cloud of adulthood and turn into our parents and thank them for their troubles.
If I'm not mistaken, that's Kieron Gillen's entire "Young Avengers" plotline at the moment.
Too many of us tremble in fear at the idea of turning into a stiff in a cubicle, to the point we've come to glorify staying young in music and media. We're constantly joking about not being grown ups by posting youthful throwbacks on social media sites, and are even beginning a rewrite of what it means to become an adult^.
Wistful, dreamy little buggers, we are, trying to align our dreams with a practical reality. And thus far, this generation's had a lot of help dreaming--Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube have made it easier than ever for people to get in contact with those "lick-your-face famous” people we admire. And since they all come from relatively successful lives, their unified message stands as advice worth listening to: Never stop dreaming.
That powerful message is being wired into the minds of every young adult with an internet connection and a love for pop culture--that’s a lot of young adults. This flies in the face of the free-market private colleges`, where the logical choice would be to major in a financially stimulating field.
Despite being in love with the options a free-market economy gives, I am not a firm believer every damn thing on this earth needs to-or even can--be successfully marketed.
Like health care.
Or college.
So "Why don't the kids just study something useful?!" Because your life shouldn't be determined by returning an investment someone made on you. You’re not merchandise.
Unlike the shiny new products lining every store in America right now, we might not even be good at what's in demand right now--and I don't just mean the obvious lack of mathematic and scientific skills in our country. I'm talking about even more basic needs: we weren’t all cut out to be nurses, doctors, or engineers(!).
Some of us aren’t made for those fields.
And some of us just don’t want to go into that line of work anyway.
In a nation of affluence, we'll see fifty, sixty year old people leave their old workplaces and in retirement try to find some form of spiritual meaning in their lives. More and more young people are picking up on the idea of fulfillment in their futures--after all, many are still without children or major responsibilities beyond their own livelihoods. They have nothing stopping them from trying. We thirst for this level of fulfillment and happiness that can't be found if we comply to what is logical. Which is why there's now an entire self-help industry surrounding being the best version of you possible.
The
Live your legend program was started by a guy living in San Francisco who wanted to help those people wanting a new slice of life. Most of the product on their page is absolutely free (I know, right?), including a
27 question guide they feel is important to ask yourself. One question stuck with me the most: "What would you do for someone else for free?"
That question--that all-encompassing question--might just be the solving matter on what we should study in college and if it'll be worth drowning yourself in debt for. What would you do for someone else for free? Would you draw? Would you dance? Would you clean? Would you organize? Would you write?
So many successful people seem to have that "get up and go" drive towards what they wanted to make out of themselves. Those glossy, autobiographical legend stories of normal people with a special drive we can all paste ourselves into like that soldier poster in the Captain America movie. I wonder how much of it is bullshit.
To me, it seems like many of us are sitting here feeling like Steve before the serum, trying to fit into the one-size-fits-all propaganda poster.
I wonder how many of them began as timid Steves trying to do what they would've done without pay anyway. Like Tom Hiddleston once said, success comes after you allow yourself to care.
And many try and deal with this fear of caring and fear of failing in different ways. Many just don't allow themselves to ever care. Many push themselves to do so. A man named Marcus in my Math class spent his time writing down memorable quotes and committing them to memory as a motivator. He aims to be a public speaker.
I write.
With love,
Nikola Strange
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NOTES:
* “prepa” is short for “preparatoria”, or preparatory school. It’s Mexico’s equivalent to high school.
^ Does “fuck you, I’m an adult!” sound familiar? We’ve changed the meaning of becoming an adult from a stiff person in a normal job doing normal things we can’t relate to, to simply an older version of you. A version that still watches Saturday Morning Cartoons when they have a day off, but now pays bills and does laundry.
(!) Example: I'm freakishly paranoid and get super queasy with pain, so I don't want to work in the medical field despite the job security.
` Private Colleges aren’t the only ridiculously expensive luxury toy at the moment.
California leads as the most expensive state for tuitions in 2011 (la times), and
a chart from KQUED shows the staggering rise in tuition for both UC and CSU schools.