By Rachel Duboff
"What are you going to do after you graduate?" My eyes roll because I'm once again faced with the same question, and once again I have to give the same unsatisfying answer. "I'm not sure yet," is all I can muster. I'm then faced with a well-meaning lecture from a concerned adult or anxious peer about how I might be making a huge mistake, leaving behind a once in a lifetime college experience I will never get back with no certain plans ahead of me. The person across from me can't understand what's in my head, why this decision is the clearest, though not necessarily the easiest, one I've ever made. They look at me through the goggles of their own judgments, and I look back at them with the foresight the past three and a half years at Emory has brought me.
I didn't plan outright to graduate early from Emory. I came in with a fair amount of credits, as did many students, but that still wasn't enough to put me on the fast track. It all just played itself out, I can say in hindsight, albeit in a haphazard way. I spent the summer after my freshman year taking classes at my local state college. Sophomore year I was going through what students call a "slump" and I decided to distract myself of this feeling by overloading on classes during both semesters.
This was before the credit change, so by the end of the year I was already semesters ahead of my class on average in terms of credit hours. Through the Center for International Programs Abroad (CIPA), I was able to study abroad twice – the summer after my sophomore year in Europe, and the first semester of my junior year in Australia.
By the time I was halfway through my junior year, I was technically already a senior. I have no doubt there are many other stories that exist like this. My story is not particularly unique. And yet, my academic standing allowed me to think about what place, if any, I could still have at Emory.
"Emory is a sinking ship," a good friend of mine, a B-School senior, told me over dinner recently. "Good thing you're getting off." We laughed and laughed. We counted the number of scandals on our hands that the school has been through since our freshman year, ones that I will take no pleasure in articulating again here. We agreed that leading the response to Ebola was the best thing our school could have hoped for, given the circumstances. We talked about how the social scene was becoming one we could no longer recognize. We discussed all the practical reasons why my leaving is the smart thing to do: I would be saving thousands upon thousands of dollars in tuition payments. I would get a jump-start on real life, which didn't have to be so bad. I would be removing myself from the Emory bubble. I would be done taking classes.
While all of those explanations are logical and do hold weight in the consequences of my decision, they do not start or end there.
I'm so, so incredibly jaded. There's no denying that. Yes, there have been classes that have made Emory for me everything I always hoped it would be. "American Foreign Policy toward the Middle East" with William E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary Middle Eastern History, Political Science and Israeli Studies Kenneth W. Stein, was one such class. I actively looked forward to going to class, ready to engage in discussions. I read attentively. I sat up and discussed what we were learning with any friends who could force themselves to listen. My classmates and I would debate – but more than that, we would learn from one another.
That experience has been an anomaly during my time at Emory. Too often I have sacrificed my physical and mental health to stay up reading, writing a paper or studying for an exam for a class that I was required to take or that did not engage me. I have sat through lectures upon lectures with professors who just went through the motions, teaching what they've always taught, with clear indications they would prefer to be somewhere else.
A couple years ago someone I knew at Emory who was older and graduating an entire year early explained to me that it wasn't just that she could graduate early – it's that she wanted to; she was tired of shuffling through a system with standards she did not agree with – of requirements unrelated to her interests, of the latent prestige the pre-professional programs received in relation to the liberal arts, and of the administration's clinical disinterest in students' well-being.
There comes a time when we all leave Emory not because we can or because we have to, but because we recognize that at a certain point we have nothing more to give to the school and it has nothing more to give to us. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is the heart of the reason people are ready to leave, whether they do so a year early, a semester early, or even on their expected graduation date. It is the most freeing realization: while it may not be easy, and it can very well be sad, there is something comforting in knowing that your time has run its course and that new challenges await.
The fact that I am choosing to leave Emory behind earlier than anticipated does not negate my experiences here. The past few years have been the most meaningful and transformative of my life. Emory has given me the opportunity to meet some of the most incredible people; the dear friends I have made here are those I intend to keep for the rest of my life, even if my future is unclear. The few classes that have truly interested and engaged me have pushed me to be a better learner, a better listener and a more critical thinker. There are select professors here who have impacted me in ways that will never be easily articulated – they opened me up, they sat and listened when I was lost or wasn't lost at all, they challenged me to know more, to search for awareness.
But I'm jaded all the same.
I'm thinking back to a person I met while I was abroad, an Australian whose name I can't even remember. He was a friend of a friend of a friend and I only had one conversation with him, but it was the one that made all the difference. He told me that he was thinking of dropping out of college so he could do something different. Maybe travel, he told me. When he saw my eyes widen with the mixture of shock and curiosity, he told me something I'll never forget: "Just because you're young doesn't mean you should confine yourself to only a classroom. There are so many other ways to learn and grow."
"What are you going to do?" I'm asked on cue. I think of how much I've done in the past three and a half years; I've completed a double major, I've traveled across the world by myself, I've learned how to work in an office environment, I've grown in ways that have allowed me to become a better person and friend. I think of how much Emory has given me, but how things are now stagnated, for better or for worse. What am I going to do? I could work. I could travel. I could sit around. I could write. I could read. I could learn outside the classroom.
"I'm not sure yet."
Rachel Duboff is a College senior from Los Angeles, California.
