The less you know

Whether you’ve just completed your first semester or your second to last semester before graduating, you should be proud of what you have accomplished. Months of hard work have earned you the sense of pride that comes exclusively from knowing that you are one step closer to graduation and have undoubtedly grown smarter (all upon the nutrition of increasingly questionable diets, nonetheless). Of course, when I say “smarter” I hesitate to argue that I am using the word in a scholastic sense. Because if you’re like me, the classroom education we were supposed to digest over the course of a semester was really only done a few days before the final exam, and by now approximately ten percent of the information we skimmed during finals week remains.

So what I really mean by “smarter” is that you’ve had an entire semester to grow at Virginia Tech after being exposed to new social and academic experiences that manifested into newfound knowledge about yourself. Armed with these new and fulfilling experiences, you (and me, too) finished fall semester confident that you now know everything there is to know about this newest version of yourself and the environment around you. And as a veteran of fall semester, you inevitably feel more comfortable going into spring semester. Having learned more about who you might want to be in the world and the ins and outs of Virginia Tech, suddenly everything on campus, from clubs to classes, is more approachable because it’s all an extension of what has already been done.

But this sense of comfort contains one of the most dangerous mindsets possible for going into a new semester. Comfort has the unfortunate tendency to quietly become complacency, and if you find yourself too familiar with your day-to-day activities, it could mean that you are shutting out the possibility for even further growth.

Looking back at all my time at Virginia Tech, the worst thing I have ever done was allow my routines to mask the fact that I simply wasn’t doing or trying anything new. I thought I had myself, everyone around me, and the school figured out in a neat little chart and was prepared to use that knowledge to get through college. But by the time I had completed my third semester nestled into a predictable schedule of going to class, hanging out with friends, going to the gym, and ending my days by questioning why I had spent so much time not doing schoolwork, I looked back only to realize that every day I missed out on an opportunity to develop.

Virginia Tech fosters the potential for exponential personal growth in students, and by allowing myself to become complacent, it was all too easy to waste almost a year of that potential. Under the false impression that I had already figured out everything I needed to know about college, I cut myself off from new experiences, new people, and—ultimately—a new me. Since then I have reopened my capacity to continue learning about the environment around me, because college is certainly an experience that should not just be “gotten through.”

So as a new semester approaches, I encourage you to think of spring as just that—a new semester. Four months of new challenges, new successes, and new chances to absorb the opportunities before you rather than relying on what you’ve already learned. So that from now on the only thing that goes to waste in your day-to-day lives is the unopened textbook that the syllabus swore by, but the professor never uses.