My sophomore year woke me up. Oddly, it had none of the stigma associated with my riotous freshman year. By all appearances, I was thoroughly reformed. I had a second chance to succeed. This was balm to my recently disenchanted soul, primarily because, in performing badly my freshman year, I had failed to hold up a fairly substantial family legacy at Hillsdale College.
My father and mother both attended this school. I don’t remember a time when Central Hall didn’t shimmer out at me on the letterhead of one of innumerable college publications. It was an icon of higher education in my home, though my parents never expected me to trace their footsteps. My father was a true renaissance man, winning the concerto competition, founding Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on Hillsdale’s campus, double majoring in economics and Christian studies, and, most notably, graduating with a 4.0. He met my mother his freshman year. They began dating towards the end of their second semester, and married 3 days after graduation. Theirs was the perfect college experience, full of accomplishments and honors, in addition to legendary friendships and a beautiful love story. I left freshman year deeply confused by the drastic difference between my college experience and theirs, and entered sophomore year ready to pursue their college legacy as earnestly as I had renounced it the previous year.
While during my freshman year the college held me to a higher standard than I could meet, sowing humility in my wild oats, it filled a different role my sophomore year. It offered me to myself by laying so wide a range of study at my feet that I was forced to choose what I truly wanted to learn. Unfortunately for me, this required that I know myself well enough to focus my efforts, which I certainly did not. And I was scared. What if I missed college just because I was a moron? How was I to know I was working hard enough, or involved in the right mixture of things to come away with a glowing experience to tell my own children about? It was arrogance that led me to assume I’d succeed on talent alone freshman year; it was fear that drove me to do literally everything my sophomore year.
Success, after all, had been defined for me already. My impressive father had set the bar. And now that I had realized not only that I would have to work hard, but that I wanted the benefits that hard work could achieve, I retreated towards the nearest exterior standard of right accomplishment. If I did it all, just like my father had, there was no way I could miss out on his college experience.
I decided promptly to become a double English and Music major with a Philosophy minor, to join a worship team affiliated with the Intervarsity ministry, and take all of the professors that my parents had talked about when I was young. I attacked the core classes in as short a time as I possibly could to make up for the previous year’s failures. None of these things contributed the sort of security I wanted. Instead, stressed out and stretched thin, I was unable to devote myself thoroughly to any of these many commitments. The pendulum had swung backwards, from negligence into over-commitment, and I was miserable. Enter phase two of my education.
In the face of this overabundance of good things, I had to find out who I, not my father, was. I began to discover what I liked to do, where I wanted to spend my time, and what, precisely, Ian’s interests actually were. Though terrifying, developing my own vision for my personal growth also offered me an unfamiliar comfort in affirming my individual identity. I began to discover what my parents had before me. I realized that the breadth and depth of available knowledge effectively defined the parameters of my being by showing me its limits. To know oneself in such a fashion relieves the pressure to know everything. I left sophomore year content to offer myself to a few disciplines, rather than laboring futilely to possess them all.
