Earlier this fall I became a college student. Not a full-time one (I kept my day job), and not at a brick-and-mortar university (I’d enrolled in an online program), but a student nevertheless.
Returning to formal education in my forties brought excitement and a strong waft of nostalgia. In my late teens and early 20s, I’d loved college. This wasn’t simply because, 600 miles away from home and on a picturesque campus nestled on the edge of one of country’s largest metropolitan areas, I had more autonomy and more options than I’d ever experienced. Of course I enjoyed meeting new people, seeing new places, and the general thrill of having my universe widen. On campus parties. Off-campus parties. Women I befriended and guys I crushed on. Discovering that I could indeed stay out past 10pm and even enjoy myself while doing so.
Those were the social and developmental aspects of college, and I relished them.
But I also loved the college part of college. The academic part. The time I spent with books (I was an English lit major). I loved that college gave me a full-time license to go on long mental perambulations, to wade deep into ideas, to weight them and to try them out. My public middle and high schools certainly had a place for kids of an academic bent, but with college – at a small liberal arts university – I felt I’d found a whole new tribe of kin.
During the pandemic I’d taken some online courses on topics related to my professional field and allowed Duolingo to hound me into daily French practice. I’d made attempts to learn to play the guitar. I dabbled in webinars.
This felt different.
First, the sheer volume of reading. On a screen. I lost count of the hours I spent doing online modules. Then there was the digital textbook, which for some mind-boggling and inexplicable reason lacked compatibility with any e-reader known to man. I ended up reading the entire thing on my phone (grudgingly). I got used to it, but I never stopped missing printed textbooks. Something about the ability to highlight and annotate pages made me feel more connected to what I was reading, as if knowledge were a physical thing that I could hold in my hands.
I missed classroom discussions. I didn’t want to type my thoughts, I wanted to speak them.
And I wanted to hear my classmates’ opinions. I wanted to feel the energy of ideas connecting. I wanted to communicate in real time. I wanted to be part of a common endeavor instead of a woman sitting alone at her laptop, tapping on keys. Yes, I, the introvert, found myself yearning to talk to people.
With so many dimensions of the experience so different from what I most fondly associated with college, I felt somewhat at a loss. Was there anything that would connect my present circumstances to my youthful memories? Anything that could?
The answer, I found, was yes. Textbook woes and asynchronous discussions aside, I’d nevertheless embarked on an intellectual adventure. My mind traveled into new places, exploring a discipline that I’d long been curious about but hadn’t properly explored.
Now I was, in a way, on the road less traveled, taking the path I hadn’t chosen as an undergrad. And that, perhaps, might make all the difference.