One of the reasons it is worth paying $1 million for a 100-year-old sagging fixer-upper starter home in Cambridge is that you run into interesting people. At a sandwich shop yesterday I encountered a friend who is a professor of Architecture. His companion asked what I was teaching this semester. “Intro circuit theory for sophomore electrical engineering majors,” was my response, “Inductors, resistors, capacitors, transistors, op-amps, feedback, impedance method.”
He was taken aback. “Why not teach something more practical?” Like what? How to build a TV? “No, I meant something more advanced and specialized, like a graduate seminar.”
I thought about it for awhile and said “Undergrads are fun to be around. They’re always in a good mood. For the average person, the likelihood that they’ll be in a bad mood is directly proportional to their age.” I asked the architecture prof to concur: “Aren’t your students in a better mood than the average working architect?” He concurred and said that in fact he has noticed that when he teaches undergrads they are happier than the grad students that he usually teaches.
At first glance you’d expect college students to be unhappy. They’re adolescents. They don’t know what they want or what makes them happy. But on second thought maybe undergrads do have a lot of reasons to be happy. They don’t have any aches or pains because their bodies are so young. They don’t have to worry about money because their parents send it to them. They don’t have to call the plumber or electrician because the university maintains their dorm. They don’t have to take their car in for service because they don’t have a car. The last two points free them to read interesting books, watch movies, play video games, indulge in sex and drugs, etc.
When I graduated from college and moved out to Silicon Valley, to join the tech industry and seek my fortune, I ran into a fellow alumnus 11 years my senior, who took me under his wing. I asked him “does life ever get that good again,” and he replied, “no, never.” That’s why we still cling to the alumni associations, remembering those four, carefree years. As AE Houseman said, “When I was one and twenty”…
The other thing that undergrads have that the rest of us don’t is immediate, short-range access to thousands of peers from a similar intellectual and socio-economic background. It’s like living on the set of Seinfeld, where all your friends are next door, and interesting things are always happening.
Funny, I’ve always had the opposite feeling–that life gets so much better in your thirties, forties, and fifties–at least for a nerd like me.
The social whirl of college has many pleasures but also some real costs–lack of privacy, distraction, and pressure to conform are three I remember. In fond memories, we all loved every minute of our teens and twenties–but do you remember how much any snub or failure hurt back then? Do you remember how public such things were? Ouch! Sex with near-strangers–how rarely was the event worth the hours spent longing to get there–how often did we regret the entire debacle!
Things I’ve loved about my forties and fifties: My own by-choice network of family and friends. Love. Sex. Enjoying the outcome of work I did years ago. Knowing a lot more fun stuff, and looking forward to learning more. Perspective that makes most problems look pretty small. Privacy when I want it. Time and money to do almost half the stuff I want to do. Lots of choices about stuff to do next.
Like Thurber, I know that “No individual story has a happy ending.” But I do want to reassure you that much more fun stuff lies ahead!
No matter how much fun it was being an undergrad, on your own, kind of responsible, but mostly free… would you really choose to go back? I’m with Anonymous Nerdwoman.
I’m actually with my wife of 17 years, my 14 and 10 year old boys, and I’m in the working world, more aware of my surroundings. As much adolescent fun as I had back then, I enjoy the humor and company of my family now by an order of magnitude.
Work is still play, for the time being at least. But I am more aware of how that’s not true for others, so I can try to do more for them. I think I have a better handle on human nature, reality and possibility.
But why is being a grad student significantly more painful than being an undergrad. Grad students have same basic subsidies, approximately same age group, typically not homeowners.
Phil’s reply to “why not teach a grad seminar” seems to be a nonsequitor unless presumed that Cambridge grad seminars are attended by unhealthy middle-agers with expensive cars, houses, etc.
Maybe college is the platonic ideal lifestyle, but is undergraduate life superior to grad school? not demonstrated.
Have to agree with Philip on this one.
The age-old dream of humanity is not flying, but “to be back in college with the mind I have now”. Wow… That would be something.
Regarding the grad/undergrad difference, it is there. It ain’t the same thing. As a grad student, you have responsabilities. Maybe not as big as after that, but still. Otoh, as a grad student, you care less about exams. So I think I liked being a grad student more. But it’s a matter of taste.
I liked the comment about “living on a set of Seinfelds”. So true.
Again, it all depends on the career you chose. If you where intelligent enough to choose one of the fun fields of work, and if you are lucky, it may work (and no, computer science is definitely not one of them).
Regards,
I don’t agree with him at all.
I am one of those students right now, in his class.
I have bills I have to pay.
I have jobs I have to do instead of doing my homework.
I have a car to maintain.
I have to go without food sometimes because I have to pay my bills instead.
I have to pay tuition.
My mother barely makes enough money for herself.
I have problem sets, exams, meetings, papers, emails, deadlines, and professors to worry about.
I have neighbors in my dorm that leave blood on the sink that we share. Daily.
I’m upset that he doesn’t take the time to ask us instead. Perhaps at this age we are still hoping that we can make our troubles go away if we just work really hard in school.
By the time we get out of here, if we all had 1 million dollars to buy houses or were fortunate enough to get jobs we enjoy, then maybe we could continue to be satisfied with life.
I don’t know about the troubles of being a grown adult yet, but I would rather he not assume what each individual undergrad goes through in life….
He can at least *ask* his current undergrads.
by the way, tutorial was fun.
as one of the few undergrads responding to this, i think i can say that you have overlooked/forgotten a few important details about an undergrad’s life (or, perhaps, you purposely left them out to incite controversy 😉 ). regarding money, i think you might have forgotten how hard it is to get a good job while being an undergrad. not everyone’s parents support them (in fact, i hand almost all the money i make over to my mother). because we are still in college we need to balance classes and working, so we can’t have regular 9-5 jobs and make a decent amount of money. our attentions are divided making it hard to concentrate/excel in either.
you also neglected to see the other side of not having a car. we lack the ability to move easily from one place to another, so must rely on others / public transportation (i have a car, but am too afraid to drive, but i think this is true in general 🙂 ).
youth has its downfalls. in the time it took you to incur those aches and pains you also acquired in depth knowledge of your field that i lack, simply because i haven’t been exposed to/practiced it for 20 years. this is a constant frustration.
as far as sex and drugs, i certainly haven’t seen that part of college, but that could be because i live at home or maybe i just live a much more boring undergrad life than you did 🙂
I don’t agree with him at all. I am one of those students right now, in his class
as one of the few undergrads responding to this, i think i can say that you have overlooked/forgotten a few important details about an undergrad’s life (or, perhaps, you purposely left them out to incite controversy 😉 ).
Acadamecia: Ignorance , indeed , is bliss .
Although I’m not a doctor (nor do I play one on TV), I think can diagnose Phil. He has an affliction that’s nearly ubiquitous among those for whom numerous years have elapsed since undergraduate status. It’s a form of nostalgia combined with amnesia that makes the unpleasant memories of undergraduate years inaccessible (or at least less accessible than the pleasant memories). Those who have this affliction genuinely believe that their undergraduate years were somehow blissful– or at least more blissful than their current lives.
The fact is that for most people, life is largely a series of monotonous chores, punctuated with random periods of bliss and anguish. It is these periods that are remembered, with the monotony conveniently forgotten. The difference is only in the details of the monotony, bliss, and anguish, which may very considerably with age and circumstances. So the monotony of commuting to and from a cubicle and striving to stay awake during interminable and unnecessary meetings (for example) displaces the undergraduate monotony of classes, homework, and studying (things that tend not to be remembered with much fondness by former undergraduates).
Unless you’re either very privileged or very unfortunate, there’s no escape from the “punctuated monotony” model of daily life. An individual can make some effort to increase the ratio of bliss to monotony (using either the model of Mill’s utilitarianism or Johnny Mercer’s “accentuate the positive”) but I think it still works out a wash in the end. But the process of looking back tends to distort things by neglecting the monotony.
While I’ll certainly admit that undergraduate life affords largely unique social opportunities that don’t exist in the “real world,” on balance the undergraduate years probably aren’t significantly “happier” than grown-up years (if it were possible to measure such a thing objectively). The bliss and anguish are surely different in composition, but monotony is monotony no matter how different it may look.
When I was an undergrad, I thought I had it rough. No job (but few bills), no privacy in the dorm (but no mortgage or home repairs), and only other broke people as friends (but at least I had friends at arm’s length).
Now that I am significantly older (15 years after undergrad) and have a wife and kids to keep me busy (and quite happy), I realize that I had it easy then. All the free time in the world to read, learn, play, and live it up. Only 18-21 years old with a campus full of people who want to have fun the same ways as I wanted (including the occasional sexual encounters). No mandatory reason to be anywhere at anytime except for the 20 hours of class time per week, and even that wasn’t mandatory if I had a better idea like lunch or sleep. Parties, minimal supervision, available facilities for whatever, cheap food (which wasn’t THAT bad), all night card games, beautiful women (and a few ugly ones), and anything that you could imagine. Anything.
If your undergraduate days were unsatisfying or dull, that was unfortunately your fault even if you lived at home or had to work. As my old boss used to say, “There’s always time at three in the morning.” Translation: you had time to find all the fun you wanted, even if you had no money because my best times in college were free of charge…just show up and get it on.
However, now that I am on the other side of the academic environment, I think most undergrads today are stupid…
YMMV, but it seems to me the reason undergrads have reacted so violently is that they don’t know what’s coming.
Two pieces of advice to undergrads:
* make friends, hang out with them, have fun. I know it’s cliche, but it’s true. Stop taking things so seriously, really. Grades matter very little later (that may depend, of course, but mostly, nobody cares). Friends do. Most working people hang out with the friends they made in highschool, mostly because they are working and don’t have the time and occasions to make new friends. So at least, if you are going to become a boring workoholic with a house loan, make sure you have some good friends.
* what are you doing in electrical engineering school in the first place?! Do you want to sit in front of a computer screen, improving some small detail of something that nobody cares about, for the next 40 years?
For those saying “well, we’re not that happy, and it’s not so good really,” we must still answer the question: Why do the undergrads in Phil G.’s classes generally appear happier than those in graduate seminars, and than older adults do? He posited some theories, but his initial reason for teaching undergrads was that he finds them in a better mood, at least where he teaches. There must be _some_ reason.
—
Derek
http://www.penmachine.com
When I went to school I lived at home and worked full time. I’ve made almost no friends. To make things worse I moved to another contry and lost contact with everybody at home. Right now I have no friends except my wife. I can’t call anyone just to chat. I don’t make any new friends because of language/culture barrier. If I didn’t have a family this would be unbearable. Whatever you do, try not to end up where I am. Dmitri is right. Cheers.
Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman (a psychologist based at the University of Pennsylvania) wrote an excellent book about what actually makes people happy. The book is called, Authentic Happiness, and the following link will take you to the Amazon page that describes the book:
Authentic Happiness
I highly recommend it. Although it may seem like one of those saccharine “Chicken-Soup”-type books, it’s not. Seligman has a solid reputation as an experimental psychologist, and the book has a lot of good science in it.
I can only speak as a liberal arts undergrad and grad student (history), but my experience is exactly the same as Phil’s.
I am a grad student in history currently and the people I see are grumpy, grouchy, and snippy. I remember my undergrad years as chatty and amiable.
I think it has to do with the vitality of the undergrad years. You’re studying a wide range of subjects and it’s all a completely new experience. As a grad student, you’re studying a much narrower range of subjects and you’re interacting with much the same people.
In history (and liberal arts degrees in general), the subject matter is depressing, obtuse, and self-deprecatory. No matter what the ostensible topic, the discussion and scholarship inevitably revolves around genocide, oppression, and evil deeds. Most of my colleagues are incensed by the slightest thing and never seem able to exude the tolerance they praise and seek.
I am constantly feeling like I’m not one of them because I’ve worked my way throughout my college career in the real world and have been married for nearly a decade. I listen to their tired carping and wish they’d realize how self-absorbed they sound.
Oh, and I’m 28 years old. I wouldn’t trade where I’m at now for a chance to revisit my high school or undergrad years for anything.
I look forward to my thirties and forties, where I hope to really shine.
This anecdote was drastically improved by your disclosure of how much you paid for your house. It drove your point home nicely.
Time Traveling