I've always been a bit of a nerd. I don't remember a time when I didn't enjoy learning. That's not to say I loved every minute of every day of school, but I genuinely enjoyed my time there. Some said I had a real thirst for knowledge. It wasn't until junior year of college that I became overwhelmed and burnt out from going to class, day after day, with professors I couldn't understand and topics that were hard enough to learn in plain English.
Let me be honest about my junior year. It sucked. The school part at least. I constantly asked other people in my classes if they really enjoyed what we were learning or if they were in survival mode, as I so often was. It was a relief to hear many of them were just trying to stay afloat as we joked that the money would be good and we wouldn't be unemployed in our parents' basements in a few years.
Even though people were agreeing with me, it didn't make it a whole lot easier. The classes were incredibly time consuming and intellectually demanding. I didn't have a single class that I could slack off in (although I did try...), but that meant no mental breaks, no class that I could work on while putting off the hard classes. No, when I went to study, I got to choose from hard, harder, and hardest. Then, with all these incredibly challenging classes, I couldn't see the end goal. With engineering being such a diverse field, I could go anywhere and do anything, which is both freeing and daunting. Even now with this second internship at AB and a third year of school under my belt, graduation and life is just a small blurry light at the end of a loooooong tunnel. How exactly do you motivate yourself when you don't know what you're working toward? This isn't rhetorical - if you have this figured out, please let me know.
And that's where I started this summer - emotionally drained, completely exhausted, and wrestling with some existential crises (S/o to the roomies who got lots of phone calls and impromptu sleepovers during this time). I was so ready to be done with school, I warned everyone close to me that they might be dragging me back to CoMo to finish school in January when my co-op is over. The year was so confusing and disorienting because I had had a constant thirst for knowledge during my entire student career. I went to school wanting to leave knowing more than the day before. I had a desire to know that let me ask questions and spend some quality time with Google. I actually had to practice not telling random facts to people in high school because I noticed that I could kill a conversation with just one sentence, and I liked having friends. I loved learning random tidbits, putting together stories, watching documentaries, and traveling for the joy of learning about a new place.
When I got home, I was in recovery mode. I slept, ate some green vegetables that had been seriously lacking during finals week, and basically did whatever I felt like. The whole time, I missed wanting to learn things. I missed reading half of a book just because I wanted to keep reading. I missed reading encyclopedias for the sake of knowing things I didn't (this was in my younger years but I'm now confident enough in my nerdiness that I can admit that I loved reading my Google encyclopedia). I missed clicking random links on news sites just because. I missed the thirst.
After a few weeks at home, I started alternating watching Friends for the 1000th time with Making a Murderer...and that's when things started turning around (who says Netflix is a waste of time?). I was completely infatuated with this true story of a man falsely accused of rape and then accused of murder (falsely, debatably). I googled theories and what other viewers thought happened to this poor woman just trying to do her job. After a couple days, I decided I probably knew everything I was going to know about this case, and was starting to get a little too emotionally involved in the details.
Then, a friend told me about this podcast called Serial, where they tell a story week by week, and the first season is very similar to Making a Murderer. I was hooked after the first ten minutes and binge-listened to eight episodes. And just like that, without the noise of school and terrible exhaustion from never having studied enough, the thirst was back.
I've found several other podcasts now that I'm loving! I'm learning about different things that are just interesting and fun to know. I'm so thankful for these next six months, that I'll have time to do things I want to do and learn what I want to learn. I once heard the quote from Socrates, "Education is like the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." Sixteen weeks ago, I was filling my mind up with as much information as I possibly could in the time allowed [before an exam]. Now, I get to kindle a flame, learning new things that inspire other questions and lead to learning more new things. It's an organic, satisfying way of learning that will hopefully energize me for finishing up two engineering degrees in the next two years. So, here's to learning!
P.S. If you're wondering what those podcasts are, here you go: Serial (as mentioned above), Stuff You Missed in History Class, Stuff You Should Know, and Slate's Trumpcast (I actually haven't listened to this last one but it's about the psychological state of the US and they try to figure out why Trump is a candidate for President...it's next on my list)
