Dear college students everywhere,
Normally, I dedicate this column to senior-specific topics. However, the other day as I was scrolling on Substack, I came across a quote from Kristin Du Mez, an American historian and professor, that stood out to me as a message to all college students, no matter their grade.
“Watching my own kids looking through college brochures, I’m struck by how little they know—how little they can comprehend—about what college really is, or can be,” Du Mez wrote. “It isn’t primarily about majors or amenities or a vibe. It is about the people they will meet, the people they will know and who will know them. It is about the faculty and staff who will pour their own lives into their lives. It is about deepening their learning, and their humanity, before it is about credentials or employment prospects.”
Reading this, I began thinking about the people I have met in college and the lessons they taught me outside the classroom as well as within.
The first important lesson I learned in college, and yes, it is cliché, is that being told no can be a good thing. My first semester here, my academic advisor told me no when I said I was going to declare my major three weeks in. His advice was to give it more time and not to rush into making decisions based on what I am being told to do by others.
Taking this advice opened so many doors I did not know existed at the time. From discovering my passions in different majors to joining organizations that correspond with those passions, I learned that being told no oftentimes leads you right where you are supposed to be.
On a similar note, friendships, professors and courses at Villanova have taught me that making mistakes is a part of the journey in growing academically and as an individual. It is inevitable that you will make mistakes, say something to someone that you do not mean or perform poorly in the classroom. These missteps teach accountability and how to outweigh the mistakes with the growth that comes alongside them.
I have learned a lot about self-growth over the past few years and about how to make difficult decisions to evolve into a better version of yourself. I learned a lot about setting boundaries in friendships. I also learned how to distinguish the people who will be there for me forever and how lucky I am to be surrounded by them through the thick and the thin.
However, the most important lesson I have learned came from inside the classroom. Well, inside multiple classrooms.
I learned the importance of letting passion and love drive everything you do. The best professors here at Villanova are the ones who do not teach just to get paid, but who teach to share the genuine admiration they have for their subjects of expertise. While teaching academics, professors are also teaching that when you put your all into something, you can truly make an impact on others.
It took a while for me to find the value behind these lessons in college. As an anxious first-year student, I thought I knew myself better than the advisor who had helped hundreds of other students through similar situations. I thought I was the first person to struggle through friend drama or to do poorly on an exam. I thought that it was not worth sitting through a one-hour-and-fifteen-minute-long class if the professor was going to talk about their life for half of it. Yet, what I see now is the work of these situations and the people within them, doing exactly what Du Mez was talking about. They were helping me, and us all, deepen our knowledge, humanity and sense of community.
With love always,
Lauren
