My Learning Statement
Being a student for the last 16 or so years has put into context the true value of school and education. Many kids in our society are placed into a cycle where they have to worry about their academic performance the entire time they are in school because we are told that if we do not do X, Y, and Z now we will not be able to get into our dream school or get our dream job. Parents are obsessed with getting their child who is not even born yet into good preschools and have planned out their first 18 years of life. This should not be the way school and society operates. Having gone through this system, it is clear to me that the way we educate our society needs a radical change.
Every freshman has an idealized view of what college life would be like for them, I know I did. As I read my Honors 100 reflection over again, it's actually pretty funny how different my perception of college was going to be versus what truly happened. I talk about how I liked the lack of handholding in classes, how I thought the difficulty of my classes were easier than expected, and that my only goal for the year was to finish the minimum requirements for the Astronomy major. As I continued through college, many of the ideas I talked about continue to be true, but I no longer see things through rose-tinted glasses. Things like my perception of greater freedom in my physics classes is really just poor communication between the professors and students. While not necessarily anyone’s fault, it is so disheartening when the canvas page for a class does not get updated until week 7. Similar things have caused me to really appreciate the smaller class sizes of Honors and Astronomy. The intimacy of 20 or so students engaged with the material has a profound difference on how I learn in the classroom.
There is so much pressure on children to decide what they want to do for the rest of their lives at such a young age, it is difficult for newly minted college students not to have great anxiety about how perfect these next four years need to go for them. I think all the schooling leading up to my time at the University of Washington failed to prepare me adequately for what lay ahead of me. Much of my education through the years has been about fact retention over actually developing skills to learn better. I believe the concept of learning how to learn is a central part of what made Interdisciplinary Honors a boon to my college education. While Honors has its own faults, the classes I took and experiences I had that were made possible because of Honors are irreplaceable. The way Honors classes are structured makes them such a low stakes environment, much different from classes in my majors (mainly physics). I think not needing to worry about whether or not I can regurgitate information over three exams each quarter makes school an immensely more meaningful and better experience.
My actual time at UW versus what I thought college would turn out to be could not be further apart from one another. I hope that as you traverse through my portfolio that you take away one thing: above all else, try to find joy in yourself and have compassion for others. I know it can feel easy for me to say because I am privileged enough to be able to go to an amazing university with well-funded institutions and take advantage of the many different opportunities afforded to me by being in my position where I can interact with diverse viewpoints and have meaningful experiences, but I believe that, without joy and compassion, we get resentful and lose sight that everyone is just an imperfect human.