We're told we attend UF to "get an education." We go to class, write our papers, take our tests and, after four years, we earn a degree. Well, I've recently come to the conclusion that the building blocks of success have little to do with your GPA. Rather, most of my "education" comes from outside the classroom.
Entering college — with all my striving and crisply honed training — I still felt I didn't understand the qualities that led to some of the highest achievements in life: lasting happiness, success, meaning, purpose. It took me a while to realize it, but intelligence, academic performance and prestigious schools do not correlate well with gratification.
From an early age, my upbringing and high school education trained me in every obscure calculus problem, major world war and biological process. Through my formal education, my teachers co-authored the person I became, crafting me to face academic challenges. But when it came to some of the most important lessons — how to navigate the contours of conversation and how to gracefully exit one, whom to befriend and whom to dismiss — I felt utterly on my own.
The traits that make a difference are certainly not taught in a classroom: the ability to understand and empathize with people; to analyze situations and distinguish underlying patterns; to create meaningful relationships; to identify and correct personal inadequacies; to challenge or adhere to the status quo; even to construct delicate emails.
I've learned these things not under the stark fluorescent lights of the classroom, but rather in the social context of meeting new people, extracurricular gatherings, managing crises, participating in lunch and dinner dates, and just the everyday business of living on my own in the heightened reality that is college.
Let's take, for an example, the fertile social grounds of a birthday dinner. It is in these types of situations where the real life lessons are learned. There are the obvious conscious lessons, such as the ability to carry a conversation and listen. But deep down, in the rich subconscious where wisdom grows and character is formed, something more is happening.
In these situations, we react to the social patterns that prevail with each unique person at the table. We can tell which clique prefers talking about shopping, and which prefers talking about drinking. We see the prevailing currents of the social ocean - which members of the table are regretting their seating choice and which members of the table are amiably complacent.
We are all performing a series of delicate social tasks. For the span of the dinner, the members of the table are demonstrating wit, complacency, compassion, tact and timing. More so, the members are learning how to interpret one another, to gauge temperament and react accordingly, to be empathic and engaging. In short, they were learning and practicing the skills necessary to succeed in life.
So, when we get back in the classroom, it's almost as if we're getting a placebo education. The idea being that our prestigious university doesn't actually work by teaching us things. It works by giving us the impression that we've been engrained with knowledge, which gives us the insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence which then makes us monetarily successful later in life.
So, let's be real here. We're not going to remember a series of facts about public policy or engineering or whatever your major may be. We're going to forget the vast majority of everything we're tested on in college. What we're not going to forget, though, are the lessons learned outside the classroom — lessons about interpretation and interaction, life and living, and people and personality.
Garrett Bruno is a political science sophomore at UF. His column appears on Thursdays.
