Climbing the Ivy

Community Service: Another Way to Learn

College is a wonderful time to be selfish.  You are independent, perhaps for the first time.  You have no real family obligations.  You walk into a dining hall, so you neither grocery shop nor cook.  You are surrounded by a welcoming community that wants you to grow and excel.  You are having fun with friends on the playing field or on a theater stage.  The campus is an idyllic and beautiful cocoon.  And your efforts are focused on learning, on achieving in the classroom, and on becoming a sophisticated thinker.

Given this self-centered culture, it can be very difficult to worry about others outside the campus.  I’ll confess I never did.  It was enough for me to study, make friends, sing a cappella, and go to football games.  I’m not really proud of that record, in defiance of a family tradition of public service, but it made me happy.

But as my time in college went on, I became aware that this was not just shallow, it was stifling educationally.  Let me focus on the latter, as being shallow can be appealing and fighting it mostly filled with guilt.  I’d rather argue that if a student remains focused on the campus and its intellectual cocoon, he or she is missing the chance to learn, to connect ideas with reality, and to understand people whose world view is radically different.

So I don’t think it’s enough to say that community service—one very worthwhile way to get off campus—is virtuous.  Of course it is.  Helping others, giving of yourself, transferring your excess of riches (mostly talent and caring, at this point in life) to those without is morally right.  Without charity and public service, we are savages.

As an educator, I should point out that community service is deeply educational, and in ways you can neither anticipate nor fully appreciate as you do it.  Tutoring a child gives you a view into lives alien to yours.  Working at a soup kitchen teaches you how non profits function and how communities sometimes do not.  Cleaning a local wetland shows you the intricate delicacy of an ecosystem.  And restoring an old church informs your thinking on religion and architecture.

I really think it’s OK to be self-centered in college.  Life afterwards will not be so indulgent.  But remember that any effort you make to walk off campus and help others will not just leave you feeling better as a human, but it will teach you countless lessons—and you don’t have to worry about grading!

How Athletes can Make Room for Study Abroad

This morning, I met many of the Hopkins incoming freshmen who are athletes.  Hopkins has two Division I teams--Men's and Women's Lacrosse--but most of our teams are Division III.  That fact has never changed my conclusion that today's college athletes are incredibly dedicated, disciplined and hard-working.  Their devotion to their sports is truly inspiring.

Such devotion, however, has costs.  Student athletes do not seem to have time for much more than their sport and their academics, so they lose the opportunity to enjoy activities that expand their vision and their team-focused circle of friends.  This means that they can limit the range of their development, from dealing with those who are profoundly different to leading in ambiguous settings.

But the cost that gets little attention is that many serious athletes do not consider studying abroad.  They look at the calendar and they divide it in two: the season and the off-season.  And both of these seasons demand commitment to their sport: running, lifting weights, practicing, attending and coaching at camps.  They also look to each other.  When they see all their teammates on campus each term, they know that is the norm for a "serious" athlete.

So it takes a special effort to convince them that studying abroad is worthwhile.  It is generally not enough to make the arguments that might work for others: traveling internationally is intensely educational and memorable, becoming fluent in a foreign language is an act of global citizenship, and being disoriented by a foreign culture makes you humble and respectful.

Athletes are more pragmatic than that.  They need to know that this would work, and that it would not set them back too far back.  So I tell them that they need to be creative in planning such an experience, which may involve preparing for an off season overseas by talking to coaches and remaining active while there.  They may settle for a summer program or something in a January Intersession, but there is no practical reason holding them back.  Any good study abroad director can be a great resource to make that happen.

Let me conclude with a story to illustrate.  A serious soccer player came to the Hopkins director, Lori Citti, to ask how he could keep up his sport while studying in Argentina--a Mecca of soccer.  He and Dr. Citti came up with a creative and highly effective solution.  He would study in Buenes Aires while living with an Argentine family who had THREE sons who were great soccer players.  The Hopkins student found himself playing semi-professional soccer on a team with these three brothers, giving him a level of competition he could not dream of having in the US.

Athletes lead amazing, challenging lives.  But those lives are infinitely richer when they include study abroad.

Taking Tests without Worrying

One of my favorite advisees, and a very successful student, reported to me that she had just bombed an attempt at the LSAT, the standardized test for law school. She graduated several years ago, traveled and is now working. She a veteran of stressful situations, but like the most inexperienced college freshman, she can be the victim of test anxiety. This is some of what I wrote to her.

Test anxiety dogs a lot of people, even the most accomplished. For that moment, they see their life being evaluated and validated, and that pressure is too great. This affects high school students taking SATs as much as more experienced students.

So I tell them the story of when I took the GREs. I had a terrible history with standardized tests. I remain convinced that Yale must have thought my SATs scores were a typographical error they were so low. My middle name was Choke.

When I got the chance to take the GREs, I had three ideas that helped. One, I knew I had other things going for me. No reasonable place—or, at least that I would respect—would put some much on these tests that other factors meant nothing.

Two, I realized this whole experience was absurd. Really, how ridiculous is it that we ask students to fill in little bubbles to determine their future? Why should a few hours of thinking and writing be so important? Now, I didn’t let this thought translate into anger or resentment. I just saw the humor in it, laughing at the entire enterprise. That really helped me to put it in perspective and to relax.

And three, I knew where to sit. Yes, where to sit. I figured out that, as a right hander, I could look up from my test sheet to see a swath of other students extending from over my right shoulder to my left. When I would look up, they were working and I wasn’t. That could make me think, “Wow, look how hard they’re working. They must really know what they’re doing. Do I?” I won’t exaggerate this problem, but it is a little intimidating. So I sat as close to the lower right corner of the testing room as I could, minimizing the number of students I could see if I didn’t turn around.

I aced the GRE. I’m not sure how much it helped getting into great graduate schools—I ultimately chose the University of Wisconsin-Madison—but it didn’t hurt. And from then on, tests didn’t bother me.

Joint BA/MA Programs: Are They Worth It?

A good friend of mine just wrote to me. Her son will be a freshman this fall at a good university, where he hopes to major in International Studies. She wanted to know if it was worth the work for him to enter the BA/MA program, where he would earn both a bachelors and a masters degree in four years. This is what I wrote in response:

These are lots of good questions, but I’ll warn you that I am biased in two ways.  First, I believe that a college education needs to allow room for exploration and learning well outside of a major, and these joint degree programs can make that difficult as they are full of requirements. 

Second, I think that Masters programs, either stand alone or joint, are pre-professional in nature.  I n other words, they are useful IF they deliver skills, knowledge and credentials that empower someone to get ahead professionally.  But that requires that you know what kind of profession you might want to join AND what kinds of skills they want or need.

Joint BA/MA programs are exciting, certainly.  They allow for a higher level of study and closer work with faculty.  They offer credentialing in a society that puts a premium on more, not less.  It’s great that Matthew is joining a university where that is an option (one I assume you apply for in a year or two), though I don’t know this one specifically.  Once he’s on campus for a while, talking to faculty, taking classes, looking at his alternatives, he may want to do this.

But assuming that he doesn’t need to make this choice now, I would say he should have other priorities.  For example, he should really focus on strengthening his foreign language skills.  College is a great, perhaps the last, place to do this, adding to current fluency or adding another language.  Going abroad is a critical way to cement this, obviously, and ironically some BA/MA programs are so compact, you don’t have time for this.  Better to walk away with fluency in, say, Spanish and Portuguese and serious travel time in Latin America and maybe an internship with a company that has trading partners in that region than to have a Masters.

Bottom line: you need to give this time, time to see if it’s needed, needed for what purpose, and whether there are other priorities—language study, study abroad, internships, a few business courses—that will rise above the need for a second degree.

A Gap Year? Thinking outside the Timing Box

While most families are pre-occupied with where a student might go to college, they rarely think about when they would go.  Traditionally, of course, students graduate from high school and are sitting in a college classroom only a few months later.  But increasing numbers of students are questioning that model by taking a “gap year” and deferring admission. 

There are lots of interesting and important things to do during that year—study abroad, earn some money, do public service, travel, take care of a relative.  But I am more interested in exploring the thinking behind whether to take the year off or not.  I try every day, and in my upcoming book “Climbing the Ivy,” to help students and their families be more self-conscious about a college education, rather than following conventions blindly.  This is a good example of how families can step back and think about the purpose of going to college.

I like to believe that college is an amazing place to grow, to explore and to break old boundaries.  But doing this successfully can require more maturity than some high schoolers have just after graduating.  They do not yet appreciate the value or meaning of the college experience.  It’s just something everyone’s doing and everyone’s expecting them to do.  Rather than following the pack, they need to own the experience themselves.  A gap year might help with that.

Just as important, a student should feel strong and healthy to face the rigors of a competitive environment away from home.  Of course, most students are perfectly capable of this.  But the students that really struggle in college are distracted by emotional challenges that generally require time away from their studies to cope with.  Others are not ready to separate from their families, which can create unhealthy, entangling decision-making.  Again, time is their friend.

Finally, even if a student rejects the idea for a gap year—certainly not for everyone—then the act of contemplating it can have an important effect.  It will help them see that the path to a successful college career may be unconventional or unpredictable in many ways.  A student might end up interested in subjects they didn’t know existed or travel to places that open up new ideas. 

But another way it can be surprising is that it might take longer (or shorter, I suppose) to get to a degree than you thought.  And that’s OK.  Taking time to try other things, to earn more money or just get well allows a student to truly blossom, and to learn that owning their education is critical.

Phi Beta Capper

I've just spent the morning at the induction ceremony for Johns Hopkins' chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the historic academic honor society.  Membership to PBK is a prized possession, an honor that many people keep on their resume forever.  We inducted a wonderful variety of students, representing a wide range of interests.  We gave our highest award to a mathematics major who also studies Mandarin and plays the viola.  It was a nice event.

But it's an even better event because it is NOT one that those students expected.  Few students work their way through college ever knowing about Phi Beta Kappa or its engineering counterpart, Tau Beta Pi.  Getting into these societies is not really a goal.  And that is the way it should be.  I have found that studentts who are truly exceptionally--at the very top of their game--gather awards and honors as if by accident.  They do not think of them as something to earn.  They are simply consumed with the love of their studies.  They embrace the work they must do because they feel so passionate about the inherent rewards of their studies, not the external benefits of excellence.

This might sound marvelous, of course, but it IS a little unusual.  What if a student doesn't feel that passion?  What if their work is a chore?  First, they must realize that that is how they feel.  Second, they should appreciate that academic life does NOT have to be that way.  And third, they need a plan to get out of that mess.  For my advisees, this means building a deliberate plan of exploration.  Think of it like speed dating, quickly exposing themselves--through classes, discussions, brown bags, etc.--to new disciplines that hold the promise of intellectual excitement.

If they can find that passion, they may be surprised to receive an invitation to Phi Beta Kappa.  And that would put a nice cap on a college experience of joyful work.

Fighting Senioritis

"Senioritis" hits graduating high school seniors hard in May.  They know where they're going to college, and that has both given them confidence and made prep school seem incredibly irrelevant.  If they care at all, they really struggle to find the energy and focus to finish school strong.

I understand.  Finding motivation and curiosity is at the heart of academic success, in high school at at the highest level of university study.  But what do you do when there's nothing in the tank?

First, seniors need to appreciate where they are.  Their prep schools have given them so much, guided them through the rockiest time of life, and proudly send them to the best colleges.  That deserves respect and attention that is best manifest in the effort to end strong.

Second, those seniors need to know this is serious business.  They may have an acceptance letter in hand, but that invitation is meaningless if their grades tank at the last minute.  Top colleges routinely revoke acceptances under these circumstances.

And third, they need to imagine this last month like a diver's approach to the end of the board.  They need momentum going into the fall in college, recapturing the excitement and drive to learn that has made them the best students in the world.  Ending with senioritis is to end with the feeling that studying is a chore.

 And that is never the right attitude for success.