How I’d Explain College to an Alien
Last week I was sprawled out on the Main Green when I paused to eavesdrop on a crowded Friday afternoon tour group.“What SAT score would someone need to have a good chance to get in here?” someone yelled. My usual reaction—some combination of raised eyebrows and the half-smile head shake that comes with secondhand embarrassment—didn’t take hold.I never toured Brown myself and I’m kind of glad I didn’t. When I see the groups wander by, my weight bounces from one leg to the other. I’m most bothered by the propagation of this packaged idea of what Brown is. Gleeful, self-assured students, effortlessly conquering their own little niches during the day and organizing marches and discussing Camus and Cornel West by night. It sells. That’s why whenever there is word of a protest, the first people on the scene are Brown’s media team.Sometimes, I overhear a talking point that’s flat-out wrong.“At Brown, every professor is required to teach undergraduates, so it’s rare that you’ll ever be taught by a graduate student.”The statement takes me back to the windowless, cinderblock room in Barus and Holley. MATH0100, my first college class. My grad student TA’s shirt was succumbing to encroaching pit stains. He was forced to be there, and I was too naive to realize that I wasn’t. Anyhow, I’d like to take a moment to thank Sal Kahn and his internet academy.
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I like to think about leading an “Honest Brown Tour.”I’d say things like:“This is health services. Please ignore the fact that it looks like a funeral home.“or“This hideous giant bear sculpture was donated by the inside trader who made his fortune on the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.”I’d end it with:“Pay attention to these building names. The only surefire way to get into Brown is to pick one of them and change your last name to it. Oh and to your left is University Hall. It was built with slave labor.”But when the wide-eyed alumni, helicopter parents, and hyperextended families passed, my cynicism succumbed to a warm tingling nostalgia. I suddenly had the urge to reach out to them. To say that happiness is never automatic, to tell the parents to lay off the gas pedal.
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Many moments of my first year of college were dismal. I remember amidst the March freezing rain, the tabs in my Google Chrome window were toothpick thin with transfer applications. It felt like everyone else was staking out their place among talented circles of upperclassmen, while in the handful of times I put myself out there—auditions, ideas, social circles— I was met with rejection.What I didn’t realize then was that almost everyone in college feels sad, lonely, or inferior. The idea of residential college is a bit absurd. I imagine how I’d explain the idea to an alien.“Alright so we take a couple thousand freshly christened juvenile humans, pump them with unrealistic expectations about the next four years of their life, throw them into an unstructured environment unlike anything in the adult world, and let their social hierarchies run wild."
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If you’re expecting me to say that everything changed and I suddenly found that thing I could be good at, you’d be wrong. I never could have been that enthusiastic tour guide, or one of the exceedingly talented students you hear about in the newsletter. What stopped me from transferring was the realization that I didn’t need to be one. Week by week, my validation came through people who didn’t care how good I was at college, only that I was was present. I could do that. One of my most seminal moments in college happened more than 1,000 miles away from here. Midway through a semester in Havana, some students in my class had me buy beer for their party. I was initially excited to make friends and happy to contribute, but when I arrived, they acted like they barely knew me. In less than 20 minutes, everyone left for a club that “was for Cuban students only,” a fine excuse save for the two French medical students they took with them. At Brown or high school, it was always the innocuous moments that cut deepest. The texts that read, “Sorry, we already have enough people.”I decompressed and fell into what a lot of us do when we’re bored or sad, and went on social media. Except going on the internet in Cuba is about as easy as buying tickets to Spring Weekend on the Brown-Guest wifi. You have to wait in line for an hour in the mid-morning sun for a couple of scratch-off wifi cards. Then you have to schlep over to a public wifi park and hope that there’s not too many people sucking bandwidth.When I finally connected, I received a link to a Facebook Brown Bears Admirers post. It was the first public thing written about me ever.“You've never wanted to be my friend because of social status or because i hung out with the same people that you did. You've always taken an interest in me as a human being and it's really made a huge impact on my life-- whenever my depression was at its worst, I always felt good knowing that you cared. If no one else really did, you'd always be there for me, no matter who or where I was…”“…No one ever gave you any awards to put on your resume for all of this. You never got paid. So thanks for the all the unconditional, radical love, Jack.”In that moment I couldn’t help but cry. Very publicly. The old man sitting next to me scooted a couple feet away. My composure yielded at validation of this universal human desire. We want to be noticed, but more than that we yearn for the recognition of our absence. For someone to say, “It really sucks that you aren’t here right now.”
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I’m thinking about all the people that I’ve met here, who soon, on some random dry San Fernando Valley day, I’ll wish could teleport over to California to bring a little nugget of what made them so irreplaceable. That feeling is what made me start to miss Brown before I’ve really left it. That’s what made me want to tell every kid on that tour not to bury their vulnerability. To not be afraid of shitty texts or being seen as corny and relentlessly seek out friends who make the world kinder, more thoughtful, and more interesting. Find the people who it will hurt to be away from.In 30 or so years, I’ll be back at Brown with my kid on some stupid tour, noting all the absurd new buildings that have sprung up in my absence. I’m probably bald. I’ll be in that space where we won’t get much financial aid but still will have to choose between private university and any semblance of retirement. I’ll open the augmented reality brochure, take one look at the $178,500/year tuition and say, “You’re going to a state school.”