This I Believe

I always loved school and learning. For years my parents would ask what did you learn at school today? As a young child I would say “Nothing”, and run off to play, as a teenager I would say “Nothing”, and sulk off to be antisocial. As I grew older I began to want to share what I was learning in my undergrad psychology classes. I began telling people random bits of information explaining that I had an abundance of useless information that I can bring out at cocktail parties and other social gatherings to impress others. More recently I began joking that I wanted to stay in school forever. I began to think of this as me “being a perpetual student”, with dozens of degrees, never having a “real” job just a class schedule. This amused me and my family and friends a great deal, but the more and more I have told this as a joke the more I started to think about how sad it would be when I would not be learning something new everyday. I feel that after I leave school I will have lost a good friend, not that I enjoy tests or papers or “all-nighters”, but I simply can not get enough of acquiring new knowledge. I once told someone that it was such a rush for me to learn things that I did not know I did not know. Meaning that without school I may have never developed interests in so many things that now enrich my life. Even when my traditional education is over I want to bring new knowledge to myself everyday. I think it is necessary for me to be aware of all the new things that can be learned in the different situations that I will encounter outside of a classroom, this is more commonly referred to as experience. I think that school is an important source of knowledge, but that there are many more ways and opportunities in the lives of everyone to gain knowledge. This is the hope that I hold onto for my future, to see those opportunities and to appreciate the knowledge that I can gain even if I am never going to be have a formalized test on it.

So I believe that I will be a perpetual student because I wish to be.