Sections

Do What You Love

We're done. It took quite a few sleepless nights, a plethora of caffeinated beverages and approximately thirty-seven variations of the "f" word, but we did it. The papers are in, the exams are marked and the grades, good or bad, are in our possession. We made it through another academic year.

Sometime in the middle of the many all-nighters I pulled last month, I wish this thought would have occurred to me: This is supposed to be fun. All of us here have chosen, and are lucky enough to have chosen, the path of a university education. And though the work sometimes seems overwhelming, you have to admit, we college kids are some of the luckiest saps on the planet. Think of it - we spend an entire year enveloped in subjects that maybe two percent of the rest of the world cares about. And if we're lucky, we'll get to do this our whole lives.

I remember when I pulled my first all-nighter. I was 14. I had an old beat-up copy of Hemingway's "Nick Adams Stories," an assignment for an English class. I was supposed to read the first story. I was awestruck. This was exciting, this was a writer writing in a style I never had seen before, about things I never read before. This was good and fine and I read the whole book cover to cover that night and when the morning came my mother came to wake me up.

"You are still up," she said. "Yes," I said. "I am and it is a good and fine and warm morning."

See? I started to talk and write and think like Hemingway, or at least I tried to. And I developed a passion for words, for the sound of them, the look of them, the heft of a book in my hands. I pulled many all-nighters that year, on my own. I read more and more. I stayed up all night writing bad Hemingway imitations. But I had fallen in love with words.

That's why I get angry at myself at the end of the term every year. Literature, in the looming face of grades and deadlines, becomes a chore. I curse because I have so much reading to do, throw things at the wall because I have so much writing to do. Then summer slips in gentle and soft, and the whole world seems right again. And all the reading and writing and thinking I just did seems like it was nothing less than a remarkable gift.

It's important to remember how lucky we are, because we are spending a good portion of our young lives learning and growing, or at least we should be. And we should be learning and growing and doing something we love. That's equally important. This shouldn't be four years we grit our teeth and clench our fists and struggle just to get through until we start earning fat paychecks. Fat paychecks shouldn't even be on our minds as students. Sure, like me, most of us are going into debt to finance this education, but hey, let's worry about the debt later - that's how the government has operated for the last 50 years.

My point is that the social pressures of getting a "respectable" job with big, fat paychecks is high, and I hope it doesn't force too many writers and artists and musicians and dancers and actors and scholars and scientists and explorers to give up on their dreams. And I hope it doesn't force any student to study something they don't love. That's wasting the gift of education.

After all the griping and complaining and stress of the last term, you know what's oddest about the whole thing? The first thing I did when I turned in that last exam: I took out a cigar, stood in the Diag and lit it up. Then, I started to think of all the books I wanted to read this summer.

- Dean Bakopoulos can be reached via e-mail at deanc@umich.edu