The Use of a University Education

For M. Ire

We are done now. The first year. Graduate school. Completed, reached its terminus, capped off, put to bed. I am no longer the new kid in school. I'll have to find a new theme song for year two. Any good toddler's songs about the Terrible Twos out there?

As usual, however, I cannot leave well enough alone. Despite this semester's satisfying denouement, my mind worries away, picking at the scab that never quite healed from my undergraduate years. Namely: What's the point?

For me personally, an easy answer quickly shoots up its hand, begging to be called on, that insistently silent pickmepickmepickme chorusing at the back of my head. The answer, you ask? 

I love doing this. 

The pure joy of creation based not on a void but on the writings of others, writings I would likely never have encountered outside of academia. My amazement, still, that other people care about these things too. The serendipitous intertextuality that would have slipped by unnoticed had I not been required to read a lot of things in very little time, chosen by different professors for different reasons, ignorant of the sparks their choices set off when these seemingly unrelated texts/ideas/discourses come in contact with each other.

This joy is a flirt. It loves to tease with intimations of greater bliss, distant by just a paragraph, thesis, chapter, book, course. If I can bare the right idea at the right moment, all that has come before, all yet to follow will fall into place, revealing the beautiful anastomosis of human thought funneling through the ages and ending in my head.

That image doesn't serve, though. A funnel suggests guidance, from specific departure point to directed destination. It suggests a move from broad to narrow, from messy to neat. How incongruous with the truly disheveled state of my brain.

Let us therefore return to anastomosis. Biology, Geology: connection between parts of any branching system, as veinlets in a leaf or branches in a stream. How sublime the image. If only we could map our minds, not their physical thing-ness, but the invisible pathways burrowed by experience, education, interactions with others, and the odd predisposition. More than a fingerprint, more than a snowflake, this map would redefine unique to orders of magnitude beyond any usage the term has ever seen before.

As an undergraduate, I fought against the imposition of a predetermined blueprint on my mental map, although I certainly would not have put it in those terms at the time. I told myself and others that I chose English because I did not want to be an engineer, and from the moment I made that choice I wanted control of my education vested in my hands, not in hands divorced from my body and self. And the wound of leaving a school that I loved for a school I learned to care for scabbed over just a bit. I told myself that English was clearly the right choice, because it came easily and offered its bounties freely. And the scab grew.

So here we are,  with the never-quite-healed wound suddenly begging for fresh air. In my mental map, fresh air is but a figurative stand-in for honesty, so prepare yourselves for a cold northerly blast of honesty.

Engineering also gave me joy, although not so freely or easily. But I didn't try. I still wonder, what if I had? What if I had bulldozed on through, decided I could do it, gone for the gusto?

Let me be clear. I have no regrets, would change nothing, and wake up every day still excited about the academic road I've taken. But I must be honest about the roads not taken. They were hard; the effort frightened me. They were not guaranteed successes; I judge my self-worth against failures both felt and avoided.

All of this navel-gazing, by definition, is highly personal, applying only to the exact traces of emotion, motivation, and knowledge that only I can follow from the start of my university journey to this exact moment.

What then, as the title promises, would I say is the use of a university education?

I have no idea.

Instead, I would offer faith. In lots of things, mostly very small, and always having to do with the notion that every moment may burn another connection, create a further anastomosis which belongs to you and you alone. However insufferable the circumstances, however unbearable the people around, however questionable your motivation, however incompetent the system, something happening right there could be the thing that fills out a tiny corner of your mental map, and you may never know that that's how it happened, but you will reap the benefits of being a more complex person, which will some day allow you to combat all the insufferable, unbearable, questionable, incompetent elements of this crazy kaleidoscopic world in which we all must figure out how to communicate across the differences that divide each of our mental maps from each other.