Transfer students at Clemson University must write a 2 page essay on the following topic as part of their transfer work. So I wrote an overly dramatized albeit true essay.
And I will use this to introduce Mechanically Involved
Prompt:What did you learn at your previous institution that has helped you with your transition to Clemson? What motivated you to succeed? How did you change/grow as a learner? What do you hope to achieve at Clemson?
Warning: I'm a hack.
Midnight Train From Georgia
Staring out of the window the rain was coming down and down, crashing like waves into my 8th Street Apartment. I feel as though even the concrete fortress of Atlanta is not free from the inevitability of nature. Inevitability…there’s something about that word that’s never a good thing. Death and taxes are inevitable. No one is inevitably cured of cancer and we don’t consider world peace an inevitability. These are things we fight for; with poisonous chemotherapy and wars organized by the united democratic peoples of something or the other. Inevitability was that Kristi will advise against a decision to stay at Georgia Tech.
Admittedly, I never saw Kristi enough. She was my academic advisor in the department. She was a younger woman that could only be described as jolly. It suited her position helping the institutionalized. I trudged through the summer rain and walked dripping in to the facilities kept at the 65 degrees Fahrenheit that only southerners could consider room temperature. Walking by the departmental posters whoring out the “going green” initiative I walked into Kristi’s office. She looked up from whatever important thing she was doing and she said in her cheery voice “have a seat Ian” setting her pen down just so on her desk. It felt warm. I guess she had never called me by name before. “So I reviewed all of the material and I am going to have to advise an academic leave” she said in that desperately cheery voice that could cure AIDS. She described it like a sabbatical that young Englishmen from the 1800’s take after serving a short term in the military or studying at Oxford. I professed that I had nothing in my life other than Tech. It was my identity and I needed it. After a good talk she had me convinced that some time off will do me some good. I called my beautiful girlfriend immediately afterwards and I received the reassurance I needed. My world was safe.
Reasons she ended the relationship I can only guess. Distance can do that to romance but at the same time I wasn’t quite the same anymore. I hadn’t changed, but I was to be seen in a different context. I had no top ten engineering institution and no mask to hide behind. Buddhists believe that our attachment to things leads to our suffering and that we can free ourselves from suffering by absolving biased attachments. A freedom I strived to indulge in. I learned this in a theology class I took at a community college out of interest during the fall of my sabbatical. Kristi was right; I was in for a self discovery trip. I assume these things are good.
My weekday evenings consisted of getting to a coffee shop in downtown Greenville by 7pm. I’d do school work while sipping on the opiate of our age until 10:30pm. The winter brought its own pleasures of that cozy feeling of sitting down with a spiced latte. It was cold outside but I was warm with content doing work. It was a routine that allowed the return of normalcy in my life. Normalcy was something I disregarded during my time at Tech as much as many people today disregard Warren G. Harding as a former president of the United States. These regular evening study sessions were therapeutic in a way but they also proved to be important for success at a community college. Not long ago I would have scoffed at the idea. Study? Attending a community college? But the difference between an A and a B revealed itself to be a matter of actual work than natural ability or intuition. This was news to my unspeakably snooty ego.
In high school I would have been categorized as part of the bum-loser-drop-out-stoner group. Those circles of kids who hung out in shady spots of our high school campus located in upper-middle class suburbia. That was my deal; filled with angst over conformity. Why the media demonized large groups of kids as misfits is beyond me. I suppose it was because they generally didn’t perform well in school or because of their flirtations with recreational drugs. But I did neither of these things. I was primarily an A student and the thought of jaywalking was terrifying. My association with the group was quite simple. I didn’t give a shit. Let’s face it, public education in South Carolina is a joke. A dog and pony show at best I always saw those who cared as sheeple. Excelling as much as my academic peers while caring less than a lame duck gave me a big head. I was smarter. Thus I would inevitably be successful. Success was an inevitability. I proved to know more than a barnyard animal and with diploma in hand I went to college. What did I know?
What did they know? These people who went to community college. I began to loathe the idea that I was one of them. However, as time went on I began to loathe myself. These people had made mistakes but who was I to judge them? Giving birth to a child at age seventeen is hard. Raising a child, working a full-time job and going to school is even harder. In Lauren I saw a truth. Truth that joy is relative to your hardships and working hard allows us find joy in the “little things”. Working harder made my evening coffee taste like pure joy. Lauren inadvertently did another amazing thing. She saved me from myself. The irony that I learned more in an ethics class from a teenage stripper than a professor in philosophy is the type of cliché in literature that is to be avoided at all costs; unless of course it’s true.
The things I’ve learned at my previous institution are insignificant compared to what I’ve learned in my sabbatical since my previous institution. I’ve learned that joy comes from self actualization rather than ill conceived grandeur, that success is never inevitable, and a variety of other life lessons that would be printed on reading material in a waiting room. The difference is that the book is 20% off and still worthless.
What do I hope to get out of my Clemson education? Time travel. I want to make up for all of the opportunities I did not take advantage of, all of the time I’ve squandered. I want self actualization and joy through hard work. If that seems a little unreasonable I’d be happy with a well paying job, entry into a graduate program, and a trophy wife. All three of which I’ve found Clemson to be more than capable of providing me with. Unfortunately, like the odds of someone reading this essay, these things aren’t an inevitability.
