| Año 3 • No. 113 • agosto 25 de 2003 | Xalapa • Veracruz • México |
Publicación
Semanal
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Páginas
Centrales
Información
General
Observatorio
de la Ciencia
Arte
Universitario
Halcones
en Vuelo
Contraportada
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And So it Begins: |
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| Buying
notebooks, pencils, pens filled with a sense of excitement about the
beginning of a new page in our lives, a tantalizing, partially familiar,
unknown; the start of classes. Yes, for most of us, it is not the
first time we have begun a new semester. Even for those of us who
are first beginning our university careers, we have the experience
of high school behind us. Teachers and students we all wait with baited
breath, pondering the possibilities that a new term holds. Personally, I have never begun a new semester of school filled with dread. On the contrary, I had feelings of excitement for the limitless possibilities that starting a new semester at college portend; dread was to come some months later, around the time of midterm examinations or finals when I discovered that my fresh faced enthusiasm at the start of the semester had transmogrified into a sullen complacency, wherein I attended class (if I attended at all,) counting the minutes till the boredom ended and I was free to go talk with my friends about which gal I wanted to date or which band’s music I was listening to at the moment. Consequently, I feared my tests because I had not prepared for them all along. To where had my interest in mastering the fine points of managerial accounting fled? Where was my fiery desire to understand the profundity of Shakespeare’s works? Why had my interest in comprehending Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus transformed into a distinct desire to sleep every time I picked up the book? Why indeed? Today, in the United States of America, you can turn on your television late at night to be bombarded by infomercials for products promising a slimmer you, a richer you, a happier you. All you need to do is call an 800 number give them your Visa, MasterCard or American Express information and with three easy payments of $29.95 you can be the person you have always dreamt of being. Some days later you receive the books, tapes and materials that you’ve sent for. You start using them for a couple of days when it suddenly dawns upon you that the program to lose weight or make more money or be happier takes something that you hadn’t contemplated when you made your purchase; WORK ! Ah yes my friends, work is the secret ingredient that we must add to any equation in order to make our dreams come true. We need to work so we may turn the excitement of our initial attendance in classes into a semester long quest to excel; not simply to get good grades but to truly gain an understanding of the material we are studying. Work is that dirty word that many of us don’t want to hear about. I must say that when I was going through school the notion of work seemed to me to be a pox on my existence. After all, better to go have some beers with friends, play video games, go on a date or have a day at the beach. Work was to be avoided, at least so I felt. Somewhere along the way in my scholastic career though, I learned an important lesson that I would like to share with all of you. At first, I thought that my desire to avoid doing my school work was simply because I was a hedonist, dedicated to immediate pleasures instead of long term goals. The truth was anything but … I was simply scared of doing my work. You see when you start a semester the promise of knowledge and self-advancement looms large. There is a disconnect from the fact that simply enrolling in courses does not impart to us any understanding about the nature and information that is to be gained in those same courses. At the end of the day, it is up to us to learn. A course, or a book, or a lecture is merely a ticket to opportunity. If we want to take advantage of that opportunity it is our responsibility to take that ticket and get on the bus ride to knowledge, a ride that finds us at the steering wheel. Learning can be scary. We fear failing. We fear missing opportunities to do something else. We fear confronting our own abilities. In the end if we are to grow as human beings we must realize that to do the work, we must vanquish our fears. Take your enthusiasm for this new semester and use it as an impetus to make a pact with yourself; that you won’t be afraid of finding out just how good you can be. Then, unbridled of fear, go do the work. It pays. |
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