{"id":9594,"date":"2011-11-10T15:17:35","date_gmt":"2011-11-10T20:17:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/UpbeaT\/?p=9594"},"modified":"2011-11-10T15:17:35","modified_gmt":"2011-11-10T20:17:35","slug":"university-life-and-the-art-of-living","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/2011\/11\/10\/university-life-and-the-art-of-living\/","title":{"rendered":"University Life and the Art of Living"},"content":{"rendered":"Lately, my facebook feed has been stacked with friends\u2019 and acquaintances\u2019 reposts of news articles talking about the most-profitable undergraduate majors<\/a>. Typically, the people posting these articles tend to be in one of the top 10 \u201cemployable\u201d majors \u2013 pure coincidence! \ud83d\ude09 Other articles I have come across speak about the \u201chigher education bubble\u201d \u2013 a conjecture that essentially, the commodity of an undergraduate education is being devalued by the disproportionately high number of people holding or pursuing such a thing. Whether or not this is true is another discussion for another day. What really concerns me is that when we sprint through our degrees with dollar-signs in our eyes, I\u2019m quite sure that we\u2019re missing the point.\n\nI am certainly prepared to accept that for social organization to work, we each need to have something to offer to society in order to rightfully receive something in return. As adults, we can no longer seek out high-school guidance counsellors to hold our hands and tell us exactly what to do next \u2013 university is a place of intense freedom, where we must make rational decisions based on our aspirations and goals. We need to take ownership of our education, by ensuring that the courses we take and the experiences that we have will give us more to contribute to the aspects of society to which we wish to belong. My friend with a passion for sociology eventually realized that in order to make meaning out of his education, he\u2019d have to overcome his fear of statistics. Having skills in mathematics, economics, and expository writing<\/a> have certainly never hurt anyone in their post-degree job search.\n\nAll of these things said, it makes me nervous to see first (or second, or third...) year students registering only for courses in a specific field because they view it as the de facto means to meaningful employment. Even as someone who lives in the lab and the library, it is disappointing to see friends (or to look back upon my earlier self) refusing to get involved on campus because it doesn\u2019t count for marks, or racing through courses in a mad dash toward efficient memorization, without taking a moment to place what has been learned in the context of the world. After all, what is the point in learning something if it isn\u2019t made meaningful and relevant in some way? Furthermore,\u00a0are not the ways in which our educations fundamentally change us what makes us truly valuable both to employers, as well as one another?\n\nThe value of learning is often hidden in unexpected places. In my massive Convocation Hall-sized first-year ecology<\/a> course, I discovered an appreciation for the intricate, deliberate beauty of nature that has since brought me to tears at the peripheries of forests. In a positive psychology<\/a> course, I built a meditation practice that has pervaded through my conscious existence and changed the angle at which I look at my own thoughts in the 16 months that I\u2019ve maintained it. Learning a second language allowed me to abstract my thinking away from words. Mathematics and logic gave me the powerful tool of formalization and argumentation in distantly related fields.\n\nIn my early years at U of T, I could never have predicted the things that awaited me here. I just had to put my faith in the pursuit of knowledge and the value of trying to expand my world into the sometimes dark corners of cultures and equations and philosophies that I might at first have been quick to judge and slow to understand. As we march through the last month of first semester, I encourage you to ask yourself what, from each course, you might be able to carry forward with you. If you weren\u2019t preparing for the MCAT, or trying to make Dean\u2019s List, what have you learned that can change the way you live your life? Which hidden worlds has your education opened up to you?\n\nI imagine myself, this year or years from now, being perhaps interviewed by a grad school admissions committee, or a research group, or simply being in discussion with some fascinating person I\u2019ve happened to meet as a result of circumstance. In these moments, the things I\u2019ve memorized fall away, but the things I\u2019ve truly learned will shape the way these people and I know each other and make decisions and interact with the world. In fact, these things have already begun to emerge in my life faster and more intensely than before, and this isn\u2019t a \u201cbubble\u201d that can burst and fade away. There are dimensions of ethics to love and food. There are subtleties in ways of living that I didn\u2019t know existed. So I guess, our time here gives us a chance to decide what our values are, and how to live deliberately. To know this is perhaps the finish line we might best cast our eyes toward. To those of us still too fresh to this place to find that, my advice is simple: try new things and ask yourself what they mean<\/em><\/strong>. We\u2019ll never have more time and opportunity for it than now.\n\n- Jennifer","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n
\nLately, my facebook feed has been stacked with friends\u2019 and acquaintances\u2019 reposts of news articles talking about the most-profitable undergraduate majors. Typically, the people posting these articles tend to be in one of the top 10 \u201cemployable\u201d majors \u2013 pure…\n<\/div>
Continue reading “University Life and the Art of Living”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>
Continue reading “University Life and the Art of Living”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,62,70,66,67,68],"tags":[6551,176,687,1296,6549,6546,6548],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9594"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.studentlife.utoronto.ca\/lifeatuoft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}