Something inside of me has shifted since I started at Boston University. Okay, many things about me have shifted (including my waist measurement, unfortunately), but I’m just realizing in my last month that I have an entirely different outlook on my academic work and why it’s totally sucked lately.
As a freshman and sophomore, I can remember writing essays for class with a huge amount of confidence. I would begin writing well before the due date and finish up a five or 10-page paper with a flourish of intellectual sparkles exuding from my head.
On about every paper I received a solid ‘A’ with beaming remarks at the end. While I don’t think I entered BU as intellectually entitled, I certainly felt that way after my second year (specifically in the Core Curriculum, which was a lot of fun, but I suspect designed to make students feel like brilliant geniuses). I developed a skewed perception of myself. My courses during the first two years of college made everything seem easy.
When I began to do serious research junior year, however, I had absolutely no neurons compared to the scholars whose articles and books I was reading.
The scholarship I was studying had quarter-pages filled with complicated footnotes and highly abbreviated apparatus critici that would require a cryptologist to decode. There was an entire world of knowledge out there, and with only two years left at BU, I was just on the periphery.
There was too much of a gap between the first half and second half of my college career. After being on a solid climb to what I though was the pinnacle of my intellectual summit, I realized that I was actually standing at the bottom of a deep, deep valley. The ignorance about scholarship I had before was totally shattered, and I saw the harsh reality of what was ahead of me.
I often wonder about my classmates who probably have not come to this realization yet. If I hadn’t applied for research funding and done serious work in my area (Classics), there is no way I would have noticed this gap.
Obviously I’m better off knowing that there is a nearly infinite amount of information out there, but in some ways this has actually made my behavior in an academic setting has actually suffer.
When I was younger, I thought all of my questions and comments in class were relevant and interesting, and I probably seemd as if I had much more self-assurance while interacting with professors and classmates.
But now I can barely speak in class at all. Everything I could say would be both vain and wasteful of everyone else’s time. I do, however, pick up on other classmates who are unaware of all the knowledge they don’t possess – these students might come off as super intelligent, but I’d bet they really aren’t. Whatever, at least I know. I guess what I’m saying is I’d like a refund.
Sydney L. Shea is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at slshea@bu.edu.
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