Graduation, like other rites of passage, is a momentous occasion in a person’s life.  It is no wonder that marching to the tune of Verdi’s Triumphal March can be a “goosebumps,” deeply touching experience for the graduates, for the parents, and even for the mentors that helped mold the students into what they are now; for the event is indeed a celebration of the triumph over years of enslaving academic work.

The graduating students happily don their togas and gowns, excited at the thought that they’re one step closer to their dreams with their degrees serving as stepping stones to reach for that next star. Each graduate leaves the gates of his alma mater with a heart full of dreams, hopeful, trusting, confident, bursting with enthusiasm, and rich with youthful idealism; little knowing that what he has learned within the four walls of the classroom doesn’t even come close to what he will learn on the outside, where everything good and bad that life has to offer awaits him.

For us who have long ago left the comforts of the university, we have learned that school doesn’t really teach us the skills that we need to deal with life.  The four or so years of study may have equipped us with knowledge that can be put to good, gainful use. We, however, were never taught how to deal with life’s ups and downs.  Instead, we only learn the life skills we need as we plod on in the uncertain terrain of life.

The world is a boundless classroom where life is the teacher.  Sooner or later, the new graduate learns that this classroom is so much different from the concrete rooms in the university; that the new teacher, life, is the gentle literature professor, the algebra teacher who used to terrorize students, the strict accounting professor, the supportive science teacher, the uncompromising calculus instructor and all his other mentors rolled into one.  He finds that Prof. Life is unpredictable and difficult to understand.

In school, his teachers never taught him where to find encouragement when a “No Vacancy” sign is all he sees as he burns his soles looking for a job.  His mentors never taught him where to find the strength to keep on when all he gets is “don’t call us, we’ll call you” but they never do.  They never taught him how to keep his self-esteem afloat when he is dogged by failure to hold a stable job.  Young as he is, he is ill-equipped with the necessary skills to deal with all this.  Soon he loses his idealism and becomes more realistic.  And so the learning process continues.

He will find that the real world is not a series of academic subjects where learning has a timetable; that it is more like an endless on-the-job training, where he learns as he goes along.  Dealing with the uncertainties each day brings is like taking the pre-graduation comprehensive exam where he must muster all that he learned in the past four or five years in order to pass.  Only this time, he doesn’t have his notes to review or past lessons to refer to; just sheer experience of which young people like him who just got out of the university don’t have much.

He learns further that unlike in the university where you are judged for your grade point average, in the real world, people judge you for what you do for a living, where you work, how much you earn, how well you live, how big your house is, where you send your children to school, how many cars you have in the garage, where you go for vacation and a myriad of other factors.  The equation has suddenly expanded with so many unknown variables and the only constant is change; solving for the unknowns x, y and z has become a lifetime chore.  Life is not linear.  It is no longer simply your efforts at studying that determine your success or failure.  Your abilities, other people you encounter or work with as well as the opportunities you decide to grab or let go determine whether you pass or fail.  And in the real world, a failing grade doesn’t mean you have to repeat the subject until you pass.  Instead, a failing grade means you make a choice whether to follow the same path and try to do better or take another one.  And none of the scientific theories you learned in school can help you make that choice.

So graduates, don’t think that after graduation, the business of learning is over.  Brace yourselves; the midterm is just about to begin.

Filed under: Just crossed my mind, March 2010 | You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.