About one month ago, my family and I moved to a new apartment. At first, I couldn’t be happier. I had gotten the biggest room from my other two sisters, I could wake up later because we were near my school and we were able to convince my dad to bring my dog. Everything was going great. As time went by, I started noticing that something was missing but I couldn’t tell what it was precisely. I thought my mom threw some of my things away or that I had lost a pair of shoes. I have been looking around for many days now, and nothing. What I didn’t know was that it was all about to change. Ring-ring, I looked at my phone’s screen and instantly understood what was missing. “I found it, that’s what’s missing!” I screamed at my phone, while my brother kept an ongoing awkward silence, trying to understand what was happening.
This is how I came to realize how one person can have a huge impact on a group and its daily routine. Since the day my brother left to college, the culture in my house hasn’t been the same. The person I used to wake up and annoy every Sunday morning and ask help for my math homework wasn’t there anymore. My routine was broken. After thinking about it for many hours, I noticed that although there was a different vibe at home, it wasn’t necessarily worse. My family was out of its comfort zone for many weeks after my brother left, but we worked collectively to get over it and construct a new culture that would keep us together. Something similar occurred two weeks ago, when one of our Innovation Academy family members left us. Emilio wasn’t just another student of the cohort, he was a key member of the team. I instantly noticed a difference in the class’ vibe, the level of energy and the interaction among members wasn’t the same. After my brother’s call, I understood that I had to change my mentality and think open-mindedly in order to find a solution to this spontaneous change in our culture. In the process of looking for this solution, I began questioning what is currently occurring in our culture. I thought of and analyzed the systems we are working on and I couldn’t find one that needed to be removed. I also thought of new systems that could be added, but the idea is not to load the class with unpurposeful habits. Nevertheless, I do believe that with time we are going to get rid of those that are not bringing our cohort together and helping us work purposefully and collaboratively. To be completely honest, I don't know exactly what needs to change in order to have this perfect culture we are all so obsessed with having. Maybe we are not even looking for the answer in the adequate question; I really don’t know. What I do know is that the first step into solving a problem is realizing that there is one to solve. We need to work harder and question what we are constantly doing in the building of our culture, and who knows, maybe we’ll end up finding it in the process--as a team.
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One of my reading nights, after finishing chapter 5, I decided to take a break and accompany my parents who were having dinner. My dad asked me about the book I was reading until late at night every day, which is not something I do very often, as he said. Instead of summarising the whole book, I decided to ask him a question, “what’s the purpose of college?” And while he was chewing, I impulsively added, “there is no purpose of going to college.” I don’t know how he swallowed to quickly but he immediately said, “what do you mean there is no purpose of going to college? Of course there is, it is to get you a job!” Those were the exact words that the author mentioned to be wrong about education. You should understand that my dad is a very strict person, who believes in traditional education and the usual cycle of it: school, college, and job. I, on the other hand, have started to question it for the last year and a half, and even more after reading this book. So yes, our conversation didn’t end very well. But just like all things in life, you have to take the best out of it. And what I got out of this conversation with my dad was a true understanding of what the purpose of college was for me, in other words, I got to know a little bit more about my purpose and what I believed in. In my opinion, going to college serves for three main purposes: to find yourself, to explore your passions and to go through failure. How are you supposed to find yourself? It is definitely a hard process, but what better way to do it than in your four years alone in college? Finding yourself means finding your true self, not the one that everybody knows or loves but your soul, that part of yourself that has all the honest answers to your questions. I believe that you can find yourself when making decisions, because your parents are not going to be there to tell you what you should do, like they have done for your whole life, so this is when your true self comes out. Also, you can find it when you have free time and you start doing something, maybe playing a sport, being involved in clubs or activities or maybe just trying to fix your friend’s bicycle, this is when that true soul comes out and does what it truly loves, what it is passionate about. Another main role that college has is to allow you to explore and discover your passions. And for me, the best way to explore is to experience. Taking classes, joining clubs, doing internships, or even talking to people with different passions and perspectives, doing all of these means experiencing. Like my mom always tells me, you have to try it to see if you really like or not. You can’t read a description about a career and decide if you like it or not, you have to try it, to experience it and then make a decision. Think about it this way, you have four years to try a huge amount of things, to discover what you like and what you don’t, what you are good at and what you are not, what you could do for a living and what you couldn’t, so don’t be afraid to experience different things in college. Even if people tell you that you are losing time, don’t listen to them and keep exploring because at the end of the day, they will lose a lot of time when they realize that the career they pursued was not for them. That’s why exploring in college is so important, because even though it can lead you to failure, this is how you will realize how some things are not for you and therefore you become more likely to chose the correct career. Moreover, college is also the perfect place for you to fail and fall because there is going to be somebody to give you a hand and help you get back on your feet. The way I see college is like a gap between childhood and adulthood, it is a place in between high school and your parent dependency and your job and complete independency. In other words, the perfect stage for you to fail. Failure almost always comes when exploring, and what it does is to let you know whether that thing you were experiencing is for you or not. Even though many people connect failure with wrong and offensive things, failure is actually the best way to learn and improve, therefore, to achieve success. Failure is a great form of feedback, and you should take it and work on it to improve, to become a stronger person, an anti-fragile person, to become successful. These are the three main purposes of attending college, and basically what they do is guide you to become a more independent, stronger, and honest person. And what is the result of doing these three things in college? A job. But not any job, one that you will be truly passionate about, that you will be extremely good at, that will make you enjoy waking up every morning at 7:00 AM, that will teach you new things every day and that will depend on you and your greatness. And even more reward? Money. We all need money to survive and we should be aware of it when choosing a job, but it is very different to attend college with the purpose of finding a job that will give you a lot of money than to attend with the purpose of finding your true passion and what you are truly good at, which will make you stand out from the rest of the students in your class that don’t have a purpose. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2017
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