I was recently contacted by an acquaintance still in high school for some advice on her application to Brown. I am sure you clearly recall stressing over the many generic questions that the supplemental application loves to throw around. But the class of 2016 has to answer the following: "If I could do something with no risk of failing, I would …" with 25 words or fewer.
I came up with several theories that may explain why Brown would ask such a thing before I started to ponder the bubble that is College Hill. Soon I realized few actions we take here have severe or binding consequences that cannot be corrected, and our academic system, despite its many benefits, helps promote our second-guessing nature.
A lack of purpose or sense of direction is the existential crisis most of us regularly flirt with as students. In high school, it was relatively hard to be fazed by these issues. Our goals were fairly clear and set in stone. We aimed to get into a top-tier college, and we knew that if successful, that would validate many, if not all, of the decisions we may have regretted during the preceding four years. Even if we did not quite meet the target — only a few of the readers will know what this feels like — we still had this overarching purpose to guide us during high school.
Few would deny that college is a different ball game and that Brown's curriculum is unique. As open-ended as it may be, my experience has taught me that during the application process, the Office of Admission tends to value those students who want to enter college with a definitive focus. Nonetheless, the focal point of our education is up for grabs once we set foot in Providence.
How many students do you know who dropped premed or engineering? How many students do you know who casually pick up an economics concentration on the side? Why are these circumstances so common? Of course, we must laud our liberal, requirement-free education for the opportunities it offers to switch around, but it begs the question of what the consequences would be if we were slightly more restricted.
I have written about the beauty and lusciousness associated with being able to study what you want whenever you want on numerous occasions. But we need to consider whether we would have still managed to get by while studying what was initially expected of us. With most situations, our academic regulations act as safety nets that simply nullify most real ramifications.
The simplest example is the fact that we need only 30 course credits to graduate, giving us the option to drop two courses in a mere eight semesters and still comfortably graduate. If you do drop these classes, it is guaranteed that it will not show on your transcript. Though these measures can provide great respite from anxiety, they encourage the idea that our academic decisions have little long-run effect and drive many students away from facing any real intellectual struggles before they graduate.
Not even when declaring a concentration are we faced with dire consequences. We meet with an adviser and write a couple of long-winded, mostly fictional paragraphs about why we need to study our chosen concentration. But we each know that when the going gets tough, we can still pull out and switch concentrations up until the last semester.
I am not trying to completely degrade the benefit of the doubt our system provides. Reasons to drop a class or concentration are usually legitimate. Yet there are several scenarios that arise where it pushes us to take the easy route out as opposed to the eye-opening challenging curriculum it was set up to be. And our capacity to constantly control our studies can often hold us back from fully committing and realizing our potential in a particular field. I still view the Open Curriculum as the providing most empowering education, but its benefits can also lead to some pitfalls.
Nikhil Kalyanpur '13 is an Environmental Studies concentrator who can be reached at nik.kalyanpur@gmail.com
