Fall (Into) Classes
Choosing courses is tricky, and trying to get all of the classes you want, while balancing your schedule and making sure that no classes overlap…
The first big “last ___” moment came for me earlier this week, as I had my final class as an undergraduate on April 28th. It wasn’t actually supposed to happen during reading period, but the mountains of snowfall earlier this winter led to some professors using the university’s optional makeup days. When it ended, I handed in my final portfolio, exchanged a hug with the instructor, the incomparable Mark Gosztyla, and walked out the front door of East Hall and onto the academic quad.
As I walked through the quad after my last class, looking at the buildings and remembering a moment I’d spent in each one—classes in Braker, Barnum and East, visiting professors in Packard, a lot of time in Eaton’s computer lab, an appointment in Ballou because I got in a teensy bit of trouble one time sophomore year—they felt right. Brick red, nestled against walkways and lawns, lit up golden in the setting April sun, they felt like a childhood home.
Then it dawned on me that the simple fact of waking up, grabbing a notebook and pencil, and walking (or running) to class would no longer be a daily part of my life. Classes are a constant you never really question—you simply are a student, every day from when you toddle off to kindergarten, right up until your commencement. Some of us carry on in academia, of course, and more still will return to graduate school in some capacity down the road, but we are no longer students first. We’re no longer excused from contributing to society because of our youth.
I’m sure I’ll miss that from time to time, because classes in college were amazing. You could tailor your program of study to your strengths; you could trace any passion to a professor at Tufts. In choosing to double major in economics and international relations, my passion was always development and how countries like China and my native India have pulled off their modern-day economic miracles. As I worked my way through the program, I was able to translate that intellectual passion into a program of study—courses on development, energy economics, urban economics. It led me to brilliant professors like environmental economist Ujjayant Chakravorty and political science wunderkind Michael Beckley.
And in the more rigorous classes, the ones we have to take because of a major, we’re pushed. The material is more advanced, the courses more self-driven, the grading criteria more exacting. Long nights are logged in buildings around campus with our little brotherhoods of people struggling through the major together. It wasn’t enough that my degrees were based on exploring phenomena that had fascinated me growing up; I was pushed hard in my study of them.
Classes in college challenge us to choose a path and defend our ground. They push us to need help and offer us the tools to get it, but demand we take up the tools rather than wield them for us. They seek to instill in us what our graduation requirements for honors often refer back to as “intellectual force.” That’s the purpose of a liberal arts education: to foster a thinker. The material fades, but an unshakable faith in one’s own mind, and the courage to push it knowing it will hold firm, is why we’re here.
It’s always been uncanny to me how similarly I described my own tough classes, and how friends in other majors described theirs. The methods were different: one might have piles of reading, one might require endless problem sets, one might be built around a term paper, another around two midterm exams and a final. But some things were the same: the descriptions of friendships forged through shared (but temporary) misery, the way we’d tell people what we were studying with the tone of voice of a new parent who’d gotten no sleep the night before, the shared head shakes and eye rolls when we saw each other in dining halls or the library during finals, the moments of synergy with classmates or professors when our shared love for our discipline manifested itself.
And then there are the classes we take just because we want to. There’s an innocence to a pure elective. That’s why I’m glad my undergraduate education ended with ENG 16: Forms of Poetry. It was a class I took for the sheer joy of it, a class into which I could funnel so many thoughts and hopes and fears from such a tumultuous year, a class that was a celebration of my own love for the written word and about exploring my own poetic voice. It felt like this last session of ENG 16 was the perfect last piece of my liberal arts education, because it was about joy in intellectual discovery. I suspect Tufts had been instilling that joy all along.
“Education” feels like it doesn’t do college justice. For me and everyone else, it’s been four years of “discovery”. Discovering who we are and beginning to shape who we will be when we move on. That’s what made Tuesday’s last walk home from class so special. Moving between and within these old New England buildings, I had lived a lifetime.
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