Decisions, Decisions

It’s usually sometime during orientation week when you’re standing around with a bunch of your floormates, awkwardly introducing yourselves and talking about your interests, that you realize that you’re not the only valedictorian/class president/model U.N. delegate/community service doer/mock trial champion in Columbia’s newest class. Most Columbia undergraduates, in addition to having prep-school GPAs in the 4.0s and SAT scores in the 98th percentile, were very involved in their high school’s extracurricular activities. It is not uncommon to realize that your high-school extracurricular record is nothing out of the ordinary compared with that of your new college classmates, and it’s no surprise—high school affords you the opportunity to do just about as many activities as possible to pad that Ivy League application.

Many first-years assume that college is the same way. They wander around the Columbia activities fair grabbing brochures from just about anything they’re remotely interested in, hoping that their schedules will allow enough time for them to join the Chess Club and the Wind Ensemble, the College Democrats and the Architecture Society. As these first-years soon realize, however, it won’t. Columbia isn’t high school, and most of us are lucky if our schedules allow us enough time to eat.

College is supposed to be a time for exploring, for finding yourself, but it seems like every time you turn around, you’re being forced to make decisions. You have to choose a major by the end of sophomore year, leaving little time to look at different options while still completing Core requirements. And if you want to be a premed—heaven forbid!—you pretty much need to know by the time you’re accepted into college how you want to spend the rest of your life. And amid these decisions, how many of us really have the time to figure out all of our interests?

The reality is that you have to make choices. Do you want to act in a play, or do you want to do community service? Do you want to run for student council, or do you want to get a job off-campus? Our lives here are short on time, and it seems like the sooner we make decisions about where our interests lie, the sooner our lives become easier.

The problem for many of us, though, is that our interests lie in a few different camps. You can’t do everything like you did in high school, so you have to choose, at most, a few areas in which to focus your energies. We become English majors with law-school aspirations who enjoy teaching youngsters in Harlem, or maybe architecture majors who want to be bankers who work on political campaigns. College isn’t really a time for exploring, but rather a time for narrowing down.

But often, narrowing to a few areas doesn’t mean finding one area to pursue. In fact, sometimes it means something far less easy to negotiate—finding two areas of passion. In my case, which is similar to that of many Columbia creative types feeling pressured to go into a professional field, those two areas are art and law. Should I go to law school, or should I follow a less conventional path into the world of theater? One offers a guaranteed paycheck—but will that be enough to provide happiness? These questions about what path to choose inevitably lead to questions about our very existence—which leads me to this column’s title.

I chose this title because the questions we tend to pose to ourselves in the course of making these decisions can often border on the existential. Like Hamlet contemplating whether or not to follow through on the ghost’s command, we feel as though the entirety of our futures depend on the decisions we make right now. My goal in this column is not to tell you that they don’t—it’s actually just to help you make them by fleshing them out a little more than you normally might in the midst of a crisis of being.

Even more than that, though, I hope to show you that—unlike Hamlet—you’re not at all alone in having these existential crises (and maybe also that our inability to choose doesn’t have to end quite so tragically).

Those of us who are seniors find ourselves at a time to make decisions, but the truth is, this situation has been brewing for a while. In this and subsequent columns, I’ll discuss different ways to recognize and address these decisions at all phases of one’s college career. The overarching focus will be on conflicting passions and desires (such as mine between art and law), and perhaps even finding ways to reconcile them—but reconciliation is certainly far too ambitious for a first column.

For now, remember this—first-years, don’t be afraid to explore. But remember—although you don’t have to choose just yet, don’t be fooled by those who tell you that this is a time only for exploring. The earlier you realize that decisions are actually a part of college, the easier those senior decisions will become. To put it in the words of the aforementioned tragic hero, I hope this column might help some of you to avoid losing the name of action.

Dan Blank is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science. That Is the Question runs alternate Wednesdays.
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