So there is the well-known vision of standing in front of your family, friends and classmates with a cap on your head and a gown on your shoulders, holding a scroll, a rose and shaking your deans hand as you graduate from university. Yeah, we all know it. We all know that is the ultimate goal, to get a degree to stick on the wall above our desk and it says that we really did do something with our lives. We are now employable, educated and respectable human beings that are able to enter the work force, provide for our families and make our parents proud. But what did we REALLY learn at university? The required notes from the textbooks or a love for knowledge?
Alright, so I haven’t graduated yet, but I am starting to see that the way I learn is changing. It seems like in high school I just did the homework because I was supposed to but I was pre-occupied with my friends and having fun. In my first two years of BCIT I was drowning in assignments and was thinking, “just get to the finish line and get out”! Now that I am in my third year, I think I actually understand the concept of learning for pleasure.
In the first two years with the “get your degree and get out” attitude I was overwhelmed by what the textbooks were teaching me, and to be honest, completely uninterested in half of it. It seemed like I was just learning some generic information about a topic to then be applied to real life, future situations. Then one day, I heard a teacher say something about sustainability in architecture that actually struck a chord with me, and I stayed after class to ask them about it. I realized hat after 20 minutes of talking with my professor, I had learned more in that time than the previous hour and a half lesson!
Last semester I started a critical reading and writing class, which required heaps of research on a topic unrelated to architecture. One article led to another, which led to another and eventually I had bookmarked over 20 articles and actually read every single one, and I loved them. I didn’t think I would enjoy learning as much as I did, but it just kept growing on me and eventually it started to pour into every corner of my life.
Now in my required classes I find myself wanting to understand the meaning of something that before I would have just memorized. I don’t just ask my friends how their day was, but I listen and want to know why. I have started fearing the Degree I will receive next year as it will tell me that my education is now “over”… But it never will be.
University taught me so much more than what was in my texts, and so much more than the research I did alone on things I never would have learned if it weren’t for initiative but it taught me HOW to find the initiative you need to go ahead and explore the wealth of information that this world is. It taught me to understand reason and search for it when it wasn’t found. It most of all taught me how to relate this idea to other people and make me want to know them, to really know them. Sure, in a years time I might have a degree, but I will also love even more the process of learning something. Learning is so much more than books, it can take you everywhere you want to be in life.