Eva McCord
Out of the many pieces of advice my mom has given me throughout the years, I remember one the clearest: “Life,” she said, “is split into two parts, and there are two ways to live it. If you study hard and make sacrifices during the first half of your life, you can enjoy a good second half. Alternatively, if you spend your youth purely having fun, you’ll pay the price in your adulthood. Which do you choose?”
My mother’s admittedly intense idea that education must be difficult and strenuous, yet is nonetheless a stepping stone to a good life, is the backbone of my parents’ immigrant worldview. And, using their own lives as their reference points, they are not completely wrong; it is through working hard in school and achieving academic success that both of my parents were able to immigrate from China, and it is due to immersing themselves in higher education that they have been able to give my sister and me a good life in America. There is truth in my mother’s words—it has shaped the life she knows today.
Thus, I have grown up under the philosophy that life is a series of hard-earned stepping stones towards the ultimate destination of happiness, and the ideal way to live your life is by sacrificing your youth for a comfortable future. So I, probably like many others here at UChicago, spent much of my middle and high school years agonizing over how to get into a good college. Doing well at a “good” college would necessarily bring me to a good job, and doing well at that good job would set me up for a “good” life. If I invested my earlier years into mastering education, then I’d be able to set myself up for success in the future.
In this way, formative portions of my life—my teens, for example—have been reduced to weird, in-between eras of goal-achieving. I didn’t completely miss out on teenage experiences—I had friends I loved, and I spent good time with them—but I also never prioritized anything above the specific set of educational goals I had to achieve. When I got into college, I did not fully see it as a place where I would enrich my mind—instead, it was more of an abstract next step on the path to my “good life.”
Now, at UChicago, I am often faced with two opposing ideas of college. Due to a seemingly contradictory combination of its quirky, life-of-the-mind branding and its practical, pre-professional “biz-con” nature, there seem to be two distinctive ways to attend UChicago. One is to join the established set of pre-professional RSOs, take the standard combination of classes, have a detached disinterest in what you study, and graduate with a high GPA and an equally high-paying job lined up. The other way to move through UChicago is to fully embrace the idea of college as a place of education, somewhere to wholeheartedly embrace a subject you love. You might study something that has few job prospects; you might take graduate classes knowing they’ll tank your GPA. You might learn something in your favorite class one day and walk through campus spending the rest of the day thinking about it. Perhaps one day you will find that what you study has made you move through life in a different way than before.
While the second way is obviously more romantic, there’s nothing wrong with the first option. For many, college is the most practical and obvious stepping stone to provide for themselves and their families, the best chance we have to carve out a better life and future for ourselves. As an economics and English double major, I must admit to myself that I chose economics not only because I found it interesting, but also because I need something to cling onto when post-college career hunting anxiety catches up to me. (To be clear: English isn’t a major without career prospects, but I am my parents’ daughter, after all; I must be practical, and I must set myself up for a surer future.) But rarely have I met an economics major who just adores the supply and demand models or cost analyses we study. More often than not, it is my lovely linguistics and Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) double major friend who excitedly introduces me to the latest tidbits he has learned in class, or my friend who loves religious studies whose face lights up when she does her readings. Don’t get me wrong, nobody always loves the subject they chose to study—but I see something I really love in the way their eyes shine when they explain a topic they love. It’s what I want for myself, and what I feel sometimes when I talk about English.
So while I am my parents’ daughter, I still want to experience college for its idealized, idyllic version—not as an abstracted ladder towards an equally abstract idea of a “good life.” While we are still at UChicago, while we still have the chance to learn, even a little bit, for the sake of learning, I encourage us to all take some time—one class, one non-major elective, one quarter of classes, or just however much you can commit to—to embrace what interests us for its content alone, a class whose course description makes your eyes wide and your heart race. College, especially UChicago, is such a rare moment in our lives where we are actually set free to learn, as well as given the resources and freedom to do so. We’re all already here; we all have this chance. I just hope we all choose to take it.
Jessica Zang is a second-year in the College