More than just a class

Yesterday was a great day.

I wish all stories started like this.

That would be pretty boring though, wouldn’t it?  There’s a struggle within my head that can’t decide what would be better out of these two options.

• A perfect world where everybody does what they are supposed to do and is nice to each other, so they’re all happy and never argue or hurt people; downside: life is fair and people are content, but people are also bored
• A crazy world with lots of arguments, wrong decisions, and questionable people (sounds sort of like the world we live in) and a good amount of people are happy; downside: things get messy and people get hurt and things are not at all fair.

I honestly don’t know which scenario I’d rather be living in, but the life I have is the only one I’ve got, so I might as well take the good with the bad and soak it all in as much as possible.

Something good in my life currently is University 101.  It's my favorite class.  That doesn't even sound like a real class, does it?  Well, it's a legitimate class here at the University of South Carolina, and I am a proud peer leader in this well-known program.  If you're one of my students (who may be the only people reading this blog) then you hopefully already know what it's all about.  If you aren't, well, thanks for reading my blog anyway, and I hope you find some connection out of what I’m about to say.  Or you'll be annoyed by how much I love it, but that's cool, you can make your own choice to keep reading or not :)

The purpose of U101 is to help new students adjust to all aspects of college life and to make them more likely not only to succeed academically but also to thrive in other areas of college such as friendships and campus involvement. All these things sounds amazing, and they really do happen if you pay attention and care about what you’re learning.  And frankly, you should care about what you’re learning because it’s all about you and your life up until this point, throughout college, AND after you graduate and go into the “real world.”  The conundrum of U101 as a class is that it’s a time in class to learn, but you actually learn about the other classes you’re taking at USC, about academics in general, and about tons of other helpful things that have nothing to do with class itself.  U101 is meant to be such a carefully structured and encouraging environment that helps you be prepared for just the opposite- this class and the people within it help prepare you for the situations and aspects of life that are unexpected, unstructured, and completely real.  So it actually is more than just a class you go to for 3 hours a week and never think about beyond those 3 hours.  In fact, our co-instructors’ objectives, and our hope as peer leaders, is to make you want to think about the things you learned and the connections you made in this classroom even beyond this semester and after your college experience (made 100x better by taking U101) comes to an end.

Let’s pretend college is the real world for a minute.  For my purposes as a student who spends 9 months of my year enjoying my world at USC, college is the real world.  At least until I graduate and locate to a new kind of real world, but nobody wants to talk about that right now.  So, USC. It’s my “real world.” In this wonderful world, which kind of structure would I rather have?  The first where everything goes right and everyone is always happy, or the second where lots of things go wrong but probably equally as many things go right.  I’d definitely choose the second one.  As much as I love to plan, organize, and be a peacemaker, none of those skills would feel worthwhile if everything in the world was perfect.  My real world of college at USC right now is never perfect, but it is a whole lot more amazing than I could have ever imagined, and I expect it’ll be a great thing to carry over into the real real world.  What I learn and do in these 4 years matters, and that goes so much further than what I learn from sitting in a classroom.  Unless of course that class is U101, that’s a different story.