E. Robert Morse

Dear future college student,

So, you’ve made it. Kind of. Actually, there’s still a long way to go. In reality, you haven’t done anything yet. But, you’ve shown that you’re capable of doing at least some things in the life you’ve been given, and that means that you probably will. The purpose of this letter is to turn that “probably” into a “definitely” and turn that “some things” into a “great deal.” If there is one thing that I want to convey here, it is that you are at a point where you can do anything you want—you might as well do something phenomenal. You can be a successful trader, you can be a surgeon, you can be an entrepreneur, you can be a financial wizard, you can be a concert pianist, you can be a genius mathematician—you can be all of them combined if you really want it. Here’s a start:

First, I’ve got to tell you something that you probably haven’t really thought of much. The school you’re about to attend is flawed. It’s not a simple typo on your dorm’s lunch menu, either, I’m talking about a severe and total malfunction from the very top with the president and the board down to the tango dance club that meets on Tuesday nights at the rec. gym. Your school is flawed and you’ve just agreed to make it the central focus of the next four years (give or take) of your life.

The good news is that this really isn’t news. Your school has been flawed this way for decades and has been successful anyway. Moreover, pretty much every school out there is messed up and yours is no exception. In this way, I might not even know what school you’re going to and be able to tell you that it’s flawed. No one is going anywhere, so don’t worry that you made the wrong decision. You can take this knowledge, though, and use it for your benefit as you prepare for taking on this wonder we call college life. The fact that your school is defective is handy information for someone in your shoes even if it’s not really news. So, how exactly is your school flawed?
The main gist is that your school isn’t aimed at giving you an education. The true purpose of any school or university should be to educate its students, and quite frankly, yours is not aimed at that purpose. The activities you’ll be involved with at school are either (1) directly geared toward something other than your education or (2) geared toward your education and failing. Neither of these kinds of activities help in your education, but they will occupy around 99.4% of your college life (the other .6% will be spent doing miscellaneous things like eating and sleeping). In light of this, it will be your job to go and get that education in spite of the institution.

We’ll get to how you do this in a minute, but now you might be thinking, wait a second, I’m not really going to school for an education anyway. Well, sure, it’d be nice to learn about the history and philosophy of science, but the reason I’m going to school is to have a good time and, you know, live heedlessly so I can have some stories to tell. At very most, I’ll use college to get a job. If I can walk away with a job and some great stories, college will be worth it.

This is a reasonable posture. After all, life is to be lived and college is the time when you’ll have the most freedom to live it, so live it well. Right? And as long as you can get a job out of college, your investment of tens of thousands of dollars will have reward. Right? That is right for sure. Both points are true. In fact, nearly everything you do in college will be aimed at these two things one way or another, so not only are your collegiate goals reasonable, they’re also in tune with the university’s goals. However nifty this correlation is, it is unfortunate. Mostly, it is regrettable because the goals of having a good time and getting a job should not be seen as mutually exclusive of the aim of education. You can do all three and you can use college as the environment to do them. To explain, I’ll first examine the goal of getting a job.

This professor might not be doing her job.

The fact is, you don’t want just any job. You want a good job that pays well and has good benefits. You want to be able to live at a high standard of living with all the amenities that go along with it—a nice loft in the city, a luxury car maybe, definitely an entertainment system for your DVDs and PlayStation games. You want to be able to go out on the weekend and not have to budget.
All of this is very possible. But, you’ll have to start working now to get it then. You will have to do two specific things in order to live the comfortable life described above. (1) Figure out what jobs pay the kind of salaries that support the higher standard of living. There are a lot of them out there and it is not necessarily limited to boring jobs that no one else wants. In addition to the usual high-paying jobs of legal and medical professions, computer programming has become a field where a student out of school can make six figures easy—and this is four years, not the seven for law or 8+ for medical. The options are much greater than these three too, but you’ll have to do the research and figure it out. There are ways to be quite successful with almost any profession out there, so find out who has been successful, how they did it and create your own plan to get you there too. It is worth it to take the time now. If you don’t you’ll end up changing your direction and have to redo part of your schooling. Not only is that inefficient, but it also doesn’t look good from an employer’s perspective.

(2) You’ll also have to do what it takes to get good grades. It might sound obvious (and redundant) but good grades (3.5 GPA or higher) are absolutely necessary if you want to get a good job. Different careers have different standards, but the general understanding is the same: grades mean capability. Since employers want the most capable, they will do anything to get the ones with the good grades and neglect those with poor grades.
One might ask, is it that easy to get good grades? The answer is yes. There is a system in place and whether it is flawed or not, it is a system and can be followed. It will be boring and tedious at times, but it is as simple as finding out the system and doing the work it requires. Do the coursework, do all the reading, do the homework, write the essays, always do the extra credit, study like crazy for the exam. Throughout this process you must keep in mind one very important thing: make sure you understand what the teacher is trying to teach. There is a valuable and relevant prize behind all of his ambiguous and dry rhetoric. Make sure you get that prize even if the teacher has a tough time presenting it. Remember, the teacher is your employee—it is their job to make sure you know what they are conveying. If they are not clear (and it will happen a lot), call them on it. It is their fault for not being clear. It is your responsibility to call them on their failure because no one else will.

Simply put, education should not be tedious and difficult. The reason it is these things most often is because the teacher is incapable. Teachers should be able to engage you from the start of the first class and not let you go until the end of the semester. In reality, the lessons should be so engaging and powerful and direct that all you need to ace the examination is there in the presentation, no notes necessary, no homework or cramming before the final. But, since the system is so flawed, these things end up being necessary. The teacher is incapable and you end up teaching yourself through notes, homework and studying. Don’t let that discourage you though. The prize is still there somewhere and it’s just going to take a little more work to get it.

With all this talk of studying and work, the responsibilities in college might seem too much. If you ever get bogged down by them, just remember that the hard work will pay off and it is necessary if you want a comfortable life after graduation.

If, for some reason, this isn’t enough motivation to work hard on your schoolwork, it is very possible that you focus only on the social aspects of college life. The social aspects of college life are so tempting and so enjoyable that they are difficult to deny. It’s no wonder either, put 15,000 girls aged 18-24 together with 15,000 boys aged 18-24 in their own city and the social hurricane that follows is the most basic natural occurrence in the civilized world. On campus there will be an abundance of sport, there will be constant partying, there will be underaged drinking and drug use, there will be seismic levels of sexual activity, there will be tomfoolery, there will be recklessness, there will be stupidity and dangerousness and most likely one of your fellow students will be seriously injured or killed because of it.

These things will happen whether you take part or not. And, for the most part, these social activities are so thrilling and highly enjoyable that any fearful parent out there cannot hope to prevent their child from taking part in these activities—the force is too great to be controlled at a distance. It is possible to control the force as a student. Now, I’m not suggesting that you stay away from the social activities. In fact, I urge you to take part in as many as possible. The thing is that most will find a way to go too far and they just don’t need to.

A nice campus is part of the impressive setting of most universities.

You’ll have to remember a few things when you’re taking part in all of these activities: (1) The point of all this social activity is fun. If you ever find yourself partying or hooking up and it is not fun or enjoyable, there is a problem. This happens so often it’s sick. The reason is that people just get into a routine of this social activity and end up doing it because it’s what they do, not because they want to do it. You won’t know what I’m talking about the first few months or even the first year, but keep it in mind as you build these social routines—this is what will happen and all you have to do to avoid it is stay conscious of what you’re doing. You’re having fun. The way you have fun is nothing programmed. It is an intentional, creative activity that you must have direct influence over. Find new and stimulating things to do. You’ll likely never get the opportunity to sample such an array of cultural and social activities. The whole world is brought to you while you’re there—take advantage of it and it will be fun.

(2) Social activities require other people and other people are thinking, rational humans like you. Respect everyone else you come into contact with. It won’t be easy because most will not respect you and many others will not require respect from you—they won’t even respect themselves. I hate to be so blunt, but you’ll see the latter in girls who sleep in a different bed every night or the guys who are so drunk they sleep in their own waste. It might be difficult to show respect to some of these people. But you and your schoolmates will be spending four years in this environment and that is a long period of time to be disrespectful to others. That kind of behavior will be ingrained in you by the end of your stay there and it will become who you are. It may be easy to steal the Indiana Jones trilogy out of someone’s dorm room or to ridicule less popular kids or to hook up with someone and never talk with that person again; indeed, the environment you’ll be living in encourages this behavior. But it is possible to have fun and not be so barbarous in doing so. I can’t give you a list of things not to do, but as long as you maintain respect for human dignity somewhere in everyone, you’ll do well.

(3) The most weighty thing to keep in mind when taking part in all the social activities is that they are all just social activities. That’s all they are. Nothing more. It is necessary to iterate this because it’s easy to let social activities become the most important thing in your college life. There is no question you’ll enjoy meeting people, playing sports or partying with them, exploring cultures, personalities and sexuality. But you must remember that social interaction is fleeting and is not productive in itself. The time you spend in these social encounters will be lost save for memories of them. With this in mind, consider that the four years you spend at college will be some of the healthiest, most creative years of your life. To absorb them all with activities that will produce nothing but a good story seems petty.

It is not that you should abandon social activities. You can’t. Besides that, they are important to our human needs. Rather, direct the tremendous resources available with the social interaction going on to something productive. Instead of simply having a keg party, put together a fundraiser for charity. The fun will still be had, the beer drunken and you get to do something productive in the mean time. You will come across some fascinating people in your stay at school—don’t let these resources go to waste! Find out what ideas are floating around out there. Do they form a theme? Can you collect them and make your own magazine? College is filled with triumphs and challenges—document them on film and have a showing for your classmates. If you join a band, push the limits, create a genre. Take advantage of all the incredible resources. You may never again get the chance to learn and produce so much. Learn the skills, investigate the mysteries and create!

After all is said and done, there is a lot to accomplish in this life. Why limit what you do to a few repetitive, unproductive things? College is the place where you have the freedom to accomplish the most, so why not do the most inventive things? Sure it may be more difficult than lazing around and drinking a beer before the pre-party, but nothing truly enjoyable is easy. One might argue that doing important things are respectable, but they must be saved for a few gifted people who spend their entire lives studying one minuscule thing, not regular people like us. But consider this: almost every major institution around us is ready for a shift, a reassessment, a reform. Indeed, the institutions we call culture now will be unrecognizable or nonexistent in 50 years. We’re going to need new ones to replace the old ones and we’re going to need people to build them. The unkempt scientists who perform one task every day for years are not those people. The people who will be responsible for building the future civilization are the broad thinking and creative who live life with intent.
All of this might seem like too much for the average student. Whether or not you are an average student, it may seem like too much for you. Not everyone is a visionary leader. That is understandable and it is wrong to demand that everyone must leave college having revitalized civilization. What is more unacceptable, however, is anyone leaving college an undeveloped, uncultured and dependent person. So, even if saving the world is too much, you must at least demand a complete education. You should walk away from college a cultivated, self-reliant individual. That is getting an education and that is the goal of college. You gain cultivation and self-reliance from a variety of sources at school and the social activities and class are two very important ones. I have illuminated a few ways each does this. These tools are in place for you to take advantage of them if you can, but if you don’t work hard and take responsibility in them, they will only serve as detractors of your own education.

It is possible to get an education and the tools to help are there. The only thing is that you won’t be able to drift along to get there—the system is far too messed up to allow that. It will draw you into the wrong focus and distract you from your education. You’ll have to work hard. And after you do, when you’re done with these next four years, you will be ready to move on and continue your success. If you don’t, the time after graduation will be a wandering mess of job searching and soul searching. Take stock now, gather steam and go into college with a plan. On the other side, you will emerge as someone who can do anything, attractive to others, attractive to employers, stable and capable and much better looking in general. Looking back, you will realize that this industrious path is enjoyable and much more desirable than that of your journey’s companions who lazily squandered their resources if for nothing other than the lack of a target. You’ve got some fascinating opportunities here to build an impressive personage of yourself. The best thing I can say to you now is, make it happen!