$0.02

Something was caught in my throat--maybe my heart, maybe my pride, maybe just my tongue or my breakfast. Whatever it was, it was making it hard to sit without fidgeting wildly as I watched her tiptoe with her words and make commentary with her eyes.

"So you seem to be someone with a lot on her plate," She said, cocking her head to one side and giving me the playful look of suspicion out of the corner of her bright blue eye. Her hair is platinum flawless and her suit is the perfect combination of polka-dot retro 50s hourglass housewife and high-powered, high-priced administrative academian. My Allston Burr Senior Tutor (something like a Resident Dean), whom I've always considered from afar to be a tragic woman (unbearably cute and unbearably spoiled child, distant and only mildly attractive husband), was now giving me a talk about the precariousness of my academic standing.

"You know, I give this talk to a lot of students every semester. And really, I don't know what your goals are. There was one student several years ago who has since graduated who just, who just wanted to...to pass," A wide sweeping gesture with her hand, attempting to indicate his physical passing out of Quincy house, or perhaps to show her own suspension of disbelief in dealing with the student, or maybe this is how she emphasizes her speech. "Give him all Cs, he was thrilled! And I don't know what your goals are, but remember I'm only sad about this if you are."

"This" being failing my first math midterm and being in danger of failing a class and being put on academic probation.

I have been on an ambitious quest to create a concentration here at Harvard that would allow me to explore materials from an engineering perspective, from social and historical perspectives, and in context of their uses in the art and architecture of daily living. Of course, I dicked around so much with courses during my first year and a half here (choral conducting, French A, neuroscience, linguistics, oil painting), that now I am left with a c.v. which leaves me few options for graduation and a resume that is painfully thin in expressing any coherent interest in future vocations.

My quest, with its strong (and I assure you, very genuine) personal motivations and resulting exquisite theoretical expositions on its legitimacy as a study, has crumbled in practice. I withdrew from my Engineering Sciences class after struggling through weeks without sleep or exercise. I couldn't find time to go to classes in order to complete the work for the classes; I couldn't find time to think between problem sets or lectures or reading. I was taking the perfect schedule to accomplish my goals on a 4-year Harvard timeline, and I couldn't hack it.

There is a tremendous and disheartening disconnect between the theoretical ideals I learn about in this liberal arts setting and the manner in which I am told to learn them. While the Resident Dean can tell me through her ruby lipstick that learning is lifelong and that an undergraduate concentration is no blip on the radar, she only says this because she knows that she has to pad her real message with something consonant with the trendy theoretical underpinnings of all the hundreds of pages of reading that social studies concentrators pretend to do every week. Really, she knows that i-banking interviewers, law schools, and whoever else can provide recognition--the keystone of academic success, for in this society learning is only for yourself in coincidental circumstances--needs something more than genuine personal motivation in order to give a seal of approval. She knows that taking more than four years, or a year between graduation and grad school, or taking the summer easy just doesn't look good, and will get you no further than your bachelors. Maybe she even knows that my mother, with all of her good intentions for my wellbeing, places so much less emphasis on hoping for my cultivation as a moral human being and positive contribution to civil society than my current academic success in the form of fellowships and degrees and future economic success in terms of job security and advancement.

I like reading. I like writing. I even like math when given the time to do it. Above all I love comprehension. But I can't do it all--not with only 24 hours in the day.

It's hard for me to keep a level head about this. It's hard for me to keep this in perspective, to remember, as a good and great friend told me as I sobbed to him on the phone just after the meeting, that failing a class is the least of my worries, and that my parents will always love me. It's so simple and so true, but everything in my life signifies messages to the contrary. I have been greatly discouraged by my environment and I would so like to succeed, but failing that, I would like nothing more than to break and live life somewhere out of the way--where nobody cares that I don't have the money for a nice suit or the resume to fill it. I want to keep a good attitude and take advantage of my situation, but I just don't feel like I know how.

I left her office with no solutions, just an ultimatum. And I cringed as I hit the air outside the building--air that, later in the April day, would bring snow--and I started to cry. I was trying hard to be neither jaded nor in despair, and as a result I just felt alone. And I was; I am, mostly because I choose to be. I don't want to share these feelings and I don't know that external advice can do much besides ease the symptoms--dry the tears and so forth. Whatever is stuck in my throat, I will have to clear myself--and if I believe, I have a lifetime to do it.