I attended a high school for the gifted and talented in a city famous for breeding future visionaries and intellectuals. Upon graduation, my credentials were all there, including good grades, test scores and a jarring essay about a terrible addiction. And yet, upon my acceptance to Boston University, I was rejected from the College of Communication and deferred to the College of General Studies. Angry beyond all belief and just plain sad that I had made BU my first choice, I sought answers, beginning with: WHY? “Was it my grades?” I thought. “My SAT score? The fact that my parents could afford to pay most of the tuition and that the endowment rumor was true? Was it that CGS needed a higher percentage of enrollment that year? Or was I just too dumb and unaccomplished to get into COM? Why, God, why me?”

I never got any answers to those questions, but what I did get was a quality education. What did the Cuban Missile Crisis, a math formula for fission and John Locke all have in common? I didn’t know at first. I knew what each subject was separately, but I thought maybe Michael Crichton could have offered me some advice on how to fashion a terrific script out of that riddle. It wasn’t until my concurrent lectures on Locke’s view of human nature, the behavior of atoms in a fission reaction and how the unique personalities of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were responsible for these proliferations, that I began to find some answers, and my orgasmic idea for a script flew out a window. The source of this intense pleasure finally sublimated into actually finding the answer to this riddle.

Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and I wasn’t in high school. Yeah, I couldn’t register for many other classes that I wanted, but consequently, I had the time to examine and properly scrutinize my material and discover all the connections across the humanities, natural science and social science permeable membrane. No, I definitely wasn’t in high school. I was spending my weekend nights with the sixth-floor Mugar Hermit, who stared romantically out into the Charles everyday, and I wondered when the hell I was going to have my fun and if I could interest the hermit in some cologne.

I broke out into a heavy sweat. Well, not really. But I got to thinking that there is a reason for me learning these interdisciplinary subjects so vigorously and applying these investigative techniques to my future studies. I could not afford to be someone partially ignorant if I was going to get to a high-level position, I thought. Knowing dates and general reasons were not enough. Book smarts were not enough to get me into the upper echelons of society and brushing elbows with people like Kofi Annan or Steven Spielberg. Instead, I realized that I needed to have something to say, words to call my own, and not rankings to speak for me, because quite frankly, neither Spielberg nor Secretary General Annan are interested in your school’s rankings; rather, they care about your strategy for getting NBC to back off acquiring Dreamworks, or your ingenious idea to stop the genocide in Darfur and prevent John Bolton from suppressing a detailed report of militia rapes and secret U.S oil extraction from Sudan. This is the stuff that matters, people. This is the stuff CGS gave me.

Your life does not depend on rankings; rather, it is the cultivation of your given skills and your personal network that are the deciding factors that influence your success. I formed the best mentorships of my life via the team method and close bonding – both meeting my best friends and future visionaries in my classes. I also earned my professors’ trust, respect and the invitation to reach out to them in the future. We studied as a team, criticized as a team, came up with ideas as a team, and, as a result, we’re fantastic team players, just like the people at the School of Management and COM. We learned history together, found interesting and quirky ways of solving lab problems involving brine shrimp and iodine, like the people in the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Engineering. We’re not different from you. Maybe better team players and friends, because we understand the concept of family all too well. We are every bit as intelligent and capable, if not more, than you.

So why exactly do we need to phase out CGS? For rankings? Having worked for the government and several large news organizations, I can tell you that rankings don’t matter. What I can tell you is that you need to know why things happen, how they happen and come up with solutions that no one else has. For this, you need to understand and live by the Theory of Consilience – the Unity of Knowledge – which at this point is only harvested and taught at 871 Commonwealth Avenue – CGS.

Think about what you define yourself as and what our education has given you so far. Originiality of thought and the ability to see those deep, low veins under your skin – that’s was what CGS has given me, and a bright future.