When the real learning happens

As the academic year comes to an end, one thing on everyone’s (read: my) mind is: What should I be doing with my summer? I do already have plans to come back to the city to conduct research from June to August, but questions remain. Am I spending this time wisely? Should I be taking time off, relishing the few months I have with friends and family? Will I enjoy myself, or can I be doing something more fun? Is this worth the other opportunities and plans I’m turning down? And, of course, what if I don’t have enough time to watch the World Cup?

Every time I ask my friends and fellow Columbians how they plan to spend their summers, I’m always impressed with their motivation and curiosity. One is WWOOFing (working for the World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) in France and then returning to a fashion internship in Paris. Several (including me) are participating in science research in neurobiology and pathology labs. Several others are taking the opportunity to travel inside and outside the United States. And, of course, there are still others who will be staying in the city while others will return home to relax or work and spend time with friends and family. Jobs, service opportunities, classes, and trips are all on the agenda.

In all of these plans, I get the same sense of an underlying, unspoken significance of this time of year (especially as students at a school like Columbia). For one thing, summer is a time specifically for us. Certain moments of the past academic year have definitely felt like a whirlwind. Part of me cannot believe how fast the time has flown by and that my first year of college is already coming to an end. As everyone says, I better be enjoying it and making the best of it because it’ll be over before I know it. How do I know I’m doing this whole experience correctly? And how do I put to best possible use the months of unstructured, free, filled-with-potential time that are summers? Perhaps my view will change as I’m exposed to more, but I feel like this is the time to do exactly what I want: to be productive, to enjoy every moment, to push myself. Summer is when the real learning can take place.

What do I mean by that—“real learning?” It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in the intensity of an Ivy League education, the Core Curriculum, and the immense pressure to keep up with outstandingly intelligent peers. Time during the semesters, it seems, is planned out according to assignment due dates. As a result, I constantly struggle with how I approach my studies and the material presented in the courses I take. I don’t think it is enough to study simply to attain a grade. I try to grapple with concepts, themes, and questions in order to arrive at some sort of knowledge that can be applied outside of the academic context in which they are presented. But therein lies the problem. We have so much material to cover in all our classes that I find myself plowing from topic to topic, text to text, with evenly spaced (or not) assessments along the way. The connecting what I’ve supposedly learned to real life and real-time circumstances is forgotten.

And I think this is what I find so appealing about summer. It’s during these months that I can try to take what I’ve been exposed to in the classroom and realize the potential of this knowledge beyond academia. The questions that present themselves in the texts we read in Literature Humanities, and even in some of the material in University Writing, are questions that have been asked and will continue to be asked by humanity in relation to those texts but also in circumstances we can all relate to. While I am here at Columbia, I know I am (and will be) very well-schooled. But I hope to come away having learned well, too. Education cannot simply be cultivated within the physical location of a classroom. And during this summer I will try to realize just that.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.