3 Brutally Honest Observations From My 1st Year in College
It’s hard to talk about formal education. It’s one of those few things where many people ubiquitously agree on its shortcomings, yet very few actually speak up about it. I did, too, for a long time. Why? Because I was too afraid of what people thought of me if I were to go against formal education.
Whenever I feel the urge to speak up against formal education, I imagine a bunch of Asian elders surrounding me, looking down on me with immense disappointment. But why hide in the shadows anymore? Why lie low in the thicket of conventional standards, when I’ve been contrarian in my stance all along? Here’s a take on it:
“What makes our educational caste system so stable and ubiquitous? Common knowledge.
Even if, like me, you do not personally believe in the social mobility variant of the “Yay, College!” narrative, you believe that everyone else believes it. Common knowledge is what everyone knows that everyone knows – not what you personally know or believe! – and everyone knows that everyone knows that going to a ‘selective’ or ‘highly selective’ college or university is the ticket to a better life for ourselves and our children, a ticket that’s available to anyone who’s smart enough and works hard enough to grab it.
This common knowledge of “Yay, College!” is why we put such enormous pressure on our children to get into a ‘good’ college, and it’s why so many of our children are damaged by that pursuit. It’s why we borrow such incredible sums for ourselves and our children, sums that our government is only too happy to lend to us.” — “Yay, College!” (Ben Hunt)
It’s interesting to uncover the scripts that run our lives. We’re not obligated to go to college, but college has become such a universal thing that it makes those who don’t fit under this system feel like a complete fraud. I suspect almost all of us go to college because it’s simply something we’re expected to do.
I believe college is a really beautiful thing. For many, it’s a great stepping stone in bridging the gap between high school and the real world. Thus, many do benefit from the option of going to college. But for the misfits, outliers, and trailblazers who seek to forge a new path, college can potentially serve as an obstacle toward their pursuits.
And for the longest time, I’ve felt like one. This post isn’t for the people who are enjoying their college experience and get a lot out of it, but if you’re interested in hearing the other side of the story, I’m glad to welcome you. This post is for people who feel this burning desire within to head on the less-trodden path.
I finish my first year at university in less than 3 weeks, so here are some takeaways, observations, and lessons from this wild-8-month experiment.
1. Work
The biggest lie we’ve been told is regarding work and play as two separate entities. And how can we not fall for this notion? School has ingrained this concept in our minds, ever since day one. Work is seen as something boring, monotonous, and repetitive — instead of something that lights the fire within you.
But I understand why schools do this. Work is to teach you the importance of working hard. That’s a very valuable lesson and especially crucial for youngsters to understand. The message is: “Work hard before play.” I have nothing against that; I fully support it. That’s the foundation of habit-building.
The problem, however, is when people take that message too seriously and begin applying this same message to their careers and jobs. You hear adults all the time complaining about how pointless or boring their work seems to be. And they’ll say, “Welcome to adulthood 101. Suck it up, kid.” Yeah, sorry… no thanks.
“When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn't—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.
Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.” - How to Do What You Love (Paul Graham)
In college, the notion of work ≠ play has only significantly amplified. Instead of experiencing an atmosphere of curiosity and wonder, I’m met with deadpan stares and carelessness in my classes. How can I not feel the same way myself, marching into class every day feeling like a zombie that just woke up from its nightly slumber?
“The reason why millions of people are so dissatisfied with their work despite their high pay or accolades is because no fiscal incentive or reputational reward can replace the dimmed light bulb of one’s curiosity. You might be able to rationalize your predicament for a few years, but attempting to do so for decades will introduce an identity crisis that you won’t be equipped to handle.” - True Learning is Done with Agency (Lawrence Yeo)
Doing something you love vs. doing something that’s pointless is a day-and-night difference. Going into college, I already had a strong intuition about what I wanted to do, and it felt like classes, the people I was around, and the environment I was in only sucked away the energy I had for my work. It felt like I had a parasite in my body.
We underestimate the importance of finding work you love. Do you really want to slave away over 50% of your one and precious life to be doing something you hate, only to wake up at the age of 60 regretting everything? This diagram puts it all into perspective. What you work on is one of the great missions of your life.
“Finding work you want to keep doing is “the great work of your life.” “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The game we should play is to “be resolutely and faithfully what you are.” The search for work worth doing is the real work and one of the most important pursuits in life. While money is important on the pathless path, using it as a filter for finding the work worth doing, especially at first, is a mistake.” — Pathless Path (
)
Automatically, this created a divide between me and college, thus contributing to the first rung of misalignment. All I wanted to do was to spend all my waking hours obsessing over what I loved to do. College felt like an obstacle to my efforts.
2. Competition
I remember in high school, someone asked me whether or not I liked doing competitions (I did a lot of piano competitions back in the day). I answered, “No, I don’t like it one bit.” He looked at me with a bit of a puzzled look. Being the insecure person I was back then, I wanted to change my mind right then and there, but I knew deep down… that competition didn’t feel right.
When I discovered René Girard in 11th grade, he forever changed the way how I viewed high school, and now college. It was like taking the red pill in the Matrix. Almost instantly, I began to see the education system as a mimetically-infested cauldron of young, lost souls conforming toward the same never-ending rat race.
“It’s hard to construct a more perfect incubator for mimetic contagion than the American college campus. Most 18-year-olds are not super differentiated from each other. By construction, whatever distinctions any does have are usually earned through brutal, zero-sum competitions. These tournament-type distinctions include: SAT scores at or near perfection; being a top player on a sports team; gaining master status from chess matches; playing first instrument in state orchestra; earning high rankings in Math Olympiad; and so on, culminating in gaining admission to a particular college.” - College as an Incubator of Girardian Terror (Dan Wang)
After coming to terms with it and graduating from high school. I vowed to leave this mimetic, self-perpetuating cycle. From then on, I committed to live a life that reflected my natural curiosity, versus something I was “supposed” to do. In the summer of 2023, I took life into my own hands: running a half marathon & creating my first music film. But a month later… it was time to head off to college.
When you’re living in your own world, tending to your own garden and doing things you deeply enjoy, it can be a major slap in the face when you’re put in an environment that actively prohibits you from doing so. The old competitive atmosphere I took forever to break away from in high school all instantly came back to me in college.
Why do people believe that competition is healthy? More than anything else, competition is an ideology - the ideology - that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; as a result, we trap ourselves within it - even though the more we compete, the less we gain. Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition.
It gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation.” - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
3. Learning
What disappointed me the most out of college was actually how mid the education is. $200 textbook only to be used a handful of times, having almost zero practical use in the class aside from homework. Lecture videos that had the same content as a good YouTube educational video that could be watched for free.
Well, if there’s one thing I thoroughly enjoyed, it was my geography discussion. 1 hour and 50 minutes. 12 people. We relished in deep discussions of contemporary geopolitics across the nation. The TA just sat there listening to us leading the conversation. That was genuinely really cool. But other than that? Pretty disappointing.
You’d expect a prestigious educational institution to provide high-quality education — to provide you with knowledge you would not have found elsewhere. But why do we still believe that these institutions serve as the unquestionable beacon of education? Ivan Illich, a 20th-century philosopher has something to say about it:
“The reliance on institutional treatment renders independent accomplishment suspect. No amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary.
All over the world the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education. The failures of school are taken by most people as a proof that education is a very costly, very complex, always arcane, and frequently almost impossible task.” — Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)
People say, “Oh, the educational system will collapse very soon.” For the bottom rung of schools, it will. But for prestigious schools like Harvard, Stanford, and UCLA, it most likely won’t. They simply hold too much prestige. So much prestige that it still has immense monopolistic control over the American educational landscape today.
“Having a monopoly on both the resources for learning and the investiture of social roles, the university coopts the discoverer and the potential dissenter. The ability of the university to fix consumer goals is something new. In many countries the university acquired this power only in the sixties, as the delusion of equal access to public education began to spread. The old university was a liberated zone for discovery and the discussion of ideas both new and old. The university was then a community of academic quest and endemic unrest.” — Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)
It’s pretty obvious that we don’t go to higher education for the sake of learning. Let’s be completely real here: we’re here for the job, the paycheck. The statistics seem to support this as well. How ironic that in our pursuit to be financially well off to live a good life, we end up steering farther away from that goal than ever before.
“In school we are taught that valuable learning is the result of attendance; that the value of learning increases with the amount of input; and, finally, that this value can be measured and documented by grades and certificates. In fact, learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.” — Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich)
Learning is something driven by innate curiosity. I have over 150 documents and notes of the best articles, essays, and books I could find across all domains of human knowledge: geopolitics, psychology, urbanism, writing, political theory, economics, climate science, education, creativity, aerospace engineering, apologetics, philosophy, health & wellness, mental models, etc. The Internet has been a godsend:
“The internet quietly enabled forms of education broader and deeper than the university. User-generated content does not need the benefit of large audiences or the approval of large broadcasting companies. Students do not need permission to attend. In corners of the internet that are easy to miss, the biggest renaissance of informal skills transfer in history is happening right now. Unlike textbooks or professors, the creators of these educational materials are willing to engage with random students throughout the world, provide feedback, and even arrange meetups — often for free.” — School is Not Enough (Palladium Magazine - Simon Sarris)
I learned how to edit and make films. I learned how to produce my own music. I learned how to properly train for marathons. I learned how to write well and run a blog. I learned how to start and host a podcast. I learned how to play piano at the international level through apprenticeship. All of this was done without school.
I don’t need college to control what I learn and what I don’t learn. Learning is a self-directed activity. Surrendering to a dysfunctional, outdated institution to control what gets programmed in your mind is a dangerous mistake. Think for yourself. Don’t simply rely on a single source for your entire worldview.
“The sad result of school’s length and primacy is that it ensures there is nothing in particular for children to do, and since the rigid framework precludes other options, we are sure to destroy their opportunities for making meaningful contributions to the world. The longer we disallow children from having the agency to act on the world, the harder it becomes for them to visualize it in the first place. The result is that we have young adults who have a difficult time adjusting once their life-script changes even a little bit. The path is rigid, yet brittle.“ — School is Not Enough (Palladium Magazine - Simon Sarris)
4. So Where Next?
“Don't let schooling interfere with your education” — Mark Twain
I don’t know. I really, really don’t know. But I hope more and more people can open their eyes to the reality of this situation, and not be blinded by institutional prestige, competition, and status quo. For those who are having a great time in college, I’m genuinely very happy for y’all. Truly mean it <3.
The truth is: there’s no one-size-fits-all model to college. Some hate it, some are indifferent to it, and some love it. Personally, after one year of experimentation, it may not be for me. You can hate me for it, but honestly, I don’t really care — otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this. I’m simply using this platform as a medium to project my own, authentic voice, in the pursuit toward light, toward truth.
If you are going to college and somehow come across this, I don’t mean this essay as any form of discouragement. In fact, it should serve the opposite. Be empowered to make your own decisions. Your education is dictated by you alone, and no one should control how and what you choose to learn.
To a life driven by curiosity,
Jeston Lu