The old cliché about going to college in the United States is that it's "the best four years of your life." You do a little reading, a little writing, and let mom and dad pay the bills, while you go to parties and carry on.
After graduation the fun is over: you have to get a job, pay rent, start a family...and the carefree student life becomes a fond memory which engenders nostalgia and longing for your alma mater. That's the traditional pattern.
Now consider a science, math and engineering school where the curriculum is considered the most challenging in higher education, the admission standards are second to none, and people often mention the ratio of Nobel prizes to alumni and faculty. I am the alumni director at that school (although not an alumnus of it). I'm glad I ended up here; nearly every day I meet someone or hear something that amazes me.
Campus tour guides tell wide-eyed high school visitors and their parents that studying here is intense — like "drinking from a fire hose." As for having fun as an undergraduate, there's a campus saying about that too: "Grades. Sleep. Social life. Pick two." In almost nine years on this campus, I have never heard anyone claim that the undergraduate experience was "the best four years" of his life.
Graduates don't leave with warm, nostalgic feelings. They leave, in some cases, feeling like they have been treated harshly. And yet as alumni they turn out to be at least as loyal, dedicated and supportive as alumni of the two other institutions where I have worked (both of which are major universities with successful alumni relations and development records).
A few weeks ago a biology professor here asked me whether, as alumni director, I had any insight into this transition from disenfranchised student to grateful alumnus. Anecdotal experience supports the following model, but I wonder if others have an opinion about this. It goes like this:
- Students arrive here passionate about math and science. They come here to learn "engineering" or "physics" or "biology." And they do learn those subjects, and much more, at the highest level possible.
- Many years later they stop and look back on the difficult academic experience. They realize as alumni (maybe ten years after graduation, maybe fifty years) that what they really learned here was how to solve hard problems.
Alumni can apply these analytical abilities, which they learn in the context of science, math and engineering, to any career path they choose. I've spoken to alumni who are attorneys, physicians, venture capitalists, artists and entrepreneurs, as well as academics, university presidents, and government leaders. They all say "what I learned doing homework or in the lab was the key to my success as a professional. I learned how to solve hard problems. I learned that I could solve hard problems."
So, the theory goes, you can learn science, math and engineering pretty much anywhere. But the ability to solve the hardest problems in almost any endeavor (sometimes without even realizing it) is the real outcome of the difficult undergraduate experience here. And therein lies the key to graduates' appreciation for their education: gratitude to the institution for giving them those tools, which the alumni have taken with them into many other fields.
I told the biology professor one other thing. I don't think a college undergraduate can know that the real skills she is learning have nothing to do with geophysics, quantum mechanics or chemical engineering. Even the brightest teenagers don't have a context for understanding how their Physics 1 homework set will help them become finance executives, or how completing chem lab will help them to run a software start up. They'll recognize the connection only after it happens. And that's when the edge comes off their feelings about their student days, and they begin to appreciate what they really learned during those late nights in the lab.
Photo: Andy Shaindlin