As a senior, I am prone to stick my fingers in my ears and chant, “I can’t hear you,” whenever someone brings up how close I am to graduating.
This childish gesture actually expresses something more profound than my resistance to growing up. It expresses how tightly woven into the Geneseo community I’ve become over the last three years. As I simultaneously look forward and backward, at the past and to the future, it is apparent that Geneseo has positioned me with a wide array of opportunities and skills.
I came to college not as a tabula rasa but with my own ideas and predispositions. I was sure I wanted to be a teacher, for example, thanks to my experiences as a martial arts instructor. Geneseo did not overwrite but rather focused this predisposition. I found out that not only do I love teaching and learning, but that I feed off an environment of academic scholarship. I want to be an English professor; I owe this clear and focused career path to my peers and professors at Geneseo.
I’ve been challenged by professors to grapple with dense theoretical concepts within a “theory to practice” framework which has forced me to answer the “so what?” question. This has pushed me to be a more autonomous and critical thinker and, by consequence, a more thoughtful and responsible fellow to others. In this way, Geneseo’s commitment to transformational learning has not only opened up space for enormous personal growth, but also augmented my skills for potential employment in any field.
One such skill has been the general ability to manage time and work hard. I was that kid in high school who didn’t do anything and Geneseo quickly eliminated this characteristic. I didn’t really know what it meant to work hard at school. Then freshman year came and kicked my butt with a workload I was not ready to manage without frequent all-nighters. But my professors’ high expectations motivated me to manage my time and apply my strong work ethic to academics.
The result of this butt kicking? I’ve only pulled one all-nighter – not including production nights in The Lamron office, of course – since freshman year and I’ve made President’s List twice.
While I am admittedly bad at balancing my academics with a healthy social life, as others often remind me, I could not end a reflection of my time at Geneseo without recognizing the profound influence on my life that my peers have had. Perhaps it’s not particular to Geneseo, but the conversations and shared experiences – prodigious and minute – with friends and colleagues have made me feel part of a tightly knit community, in a way I hadn’t experienced before college.
So as I look forward to my future after Geneseo, it is clear that I need no backwards glances. Why look behind you for something you can feel you’re carrying right in your pocket?