Three years wiser, part I

7/11/2018

Nadia R. Watts, Thomasville Times-Enterprise

A conversation with five Brookwood grads, fresh from year one in college

Perched on my office bookshelf is a framed photograph of 12 smiling people I’ve had the honor of watching grow into young adults. Just three years ago, they were high school juniors entering my AP English class at Brookwood School. The occasion for this photo? A moment of reprieve during exam week at the end of the school year. Just that morning, my students had taken my exam; they gathered later that day for a study break at my place, where we cooked fajitas and tossed the football around. In this shot, they posed arm in arm, twelve tired sets of eyes resting on widecheeked grins. Well, I must’ve blinked. Today, three years after I met these folks, each has completed his or her first year in college. I decided to catch up with a few of them early this summer to touch base. My discovery? A year living away from home can really make an adult out of a person.

What follows is a series of articles that will examine the lives of five rising college sophomores, fresh from their first college experience.

The cast of characters

A few of them were in town when I reached out for an interview. Margaret and Austin came to my office to chat, and Hampton and I met downtown for coffee. J, who was still at Georgia Tech taking summer classes, and Christopher — in New York, interning — took a break from their busy schedules to talk. They all had lots to say.

No more training wheels

Despite what they agreed was an excellent preparation at Brookwood, for the five young alumni, going to college has been a developmentally appropriate, no-nonsense lesson in adulthood — one that has necessitated motivation and sometimes the development of a thicker skin.

“You mature a whole lot quicker when you’re out there having to figure out what you’re trying to do,” Austin said. “There are no training wheels in college.”

All five agreed that the biggest surprise was the amount of work they had to do to keep up with their studies — and the personal drive they had to harness to get it done. For Austin, there’s often as many as 200 pages of reading to do after a single class session. “

The workload that’s expected for you to take on your own is much larger than I’d ever unexpected,” he said. For example, “I read the ‘Iliad’ in a week.”

Hampton, the only student from her graduating class to attend a college internationally, said she, too, was most surprised at the level of academic rigor she encountered when she started at St. Andrews, especially in her tutorials — lab classes that are taken in addition to each lecture. “You’ve got a Ph.D. or a Ph.D. candidate, and they’re looking directly at you, saying, ‘Hampton, tell me, what do you think about the rational actor model?’ And you’re looking at them, thinking, ‘I’m not as smart as you, and I know it,’” she laughed.

“I was really concerned about making sure I looked like I had everything together, and so it became a burden on me,” she said. “I would prepare four or five hours for one hour of instruction, where I’d speak two or three times.”

J even chose to remain at Georgia Tech this summer because he wasn’t as satisfied as he could have been with his initial performance in classes. Talk about a mature decision.

“It’s a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. I’m still up here. I’ve been in college for a full year taking classes the whole time,” he said. “It’s been a lot of school.”

You spend so much time in high school working towards a college acceptance, they agreed, that when you finally land there, there’s an inevitable need to soul search: why work hard now? What’s the reward

At Brookwood, Margaret said, she poured her entire focus into building her résumé and maintaining her high grade point average. After all, there would be the satisfaction of an immediate end result: all of her hard work would lead to her college acceptance. But when she arrived at UVA, “there wasn’t that pressure on me anymore. ... I had to realize it was up to me,” she said. “I had to want it for myself. No one else was expecting me to get good grades — it was whether or not I wanted them.”

Christopher said he’s experienced a shift in motivation since going to college as well — but that’s not such a bad thing. Unlike when he was in high school, “I’m not so consumed by what’s happening next. That’s something I’ve always struggled with,” he explained. “I’ve always been like, OK, what’s happening next, and how is this going to get me there? I am so full right now. I just feel so joyful in what I’m doing.”

Austin’s soul searching helped him to make a new life resolution: to buckle down in his work — but still not sacrifice the fun. He told me that very early into his freshman year, when he received his first graded paper and the score wasn’t as high as he’d hoped, he realized he had to take action.

“I guess it clicked in me: I want to take pride in my schooling. I want to take pride in my grades. And at that same time, I want to be an involved friend,” Austin said. It was then that he made the decision that he would have to strike some sort of a balance. “It was the understanding that everything was in my hands, and I kicked it into gear.”

Adult lessons; adult decisions

Life as a grownup comes with some exciting new responsibilities. For Margaret, it was finding an apartment to rent, signing a lease — and doing all that well in advance of the next academic year. Learning to budget for herself was also new: “I had a set amount of money each month. If I spent it all in the first week, that was my problem,” Margaret said.

For Christopher, the biggest adult lesson came through disappointment, when the fraternity he chose to pledge was placed on investigation for hazing allegations and later had its charter revoked.

“That was really a bummer. I never felt unsafe with all that was going on, but I understand that that is a serious thing, and that needs to be respected,” he said. “In the end, it was what was supposed to happen, but I felt that a lot was taken away from me.”

With the loss, Christopher spent the majority of the month that followed trying to figure out how to keep that group of young men together.

“That really, really consumed me. I was probably spending five to six hours a day on it, and I never wanted to do that,” he said. “It was really distracting me from school, from my relationships with my friends, from my family, from God. It just really sucked the life out of me.”

It was only when classes finished that he realized how distracted he had been from his other priorities.

“That was the thing I grew from most this year,” he said. “I was not living the way I should have been — embracing every moment and doing all the things I wanted to do and should have been doing.”

Nadia R. Watts is a career author, journalist and educator. Come back soon to read Part II of this series.

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