Earlier this week, I was writing an essay. Well, I was actually doing the research required so that I could properly write said essay. And then, it dawned on me how truly unremarkable college is. Day in and day out, we read literature, write essays on various subject matters, and listen to lectures of all sorts. There’s nothing particularly spectacular about any of these things. When you think about it, they’re not really all that difficult to do. I mean, most anyone can sit and listen to someone talk. Yet, somehow, doing these things for a long enough period of time will earn students a degree in a field in which they are now considered competent to work in.

The idea of becoming a competent mind in a field, or even the possibility of one day being considered an “expert” in a field is so strange from where I stand now— writing papers, reading articles, listening to lectures. It often feels like I’m not going anywhere or doing anything that significant, and in a lot of ways, I’m not. College can only teach you so much. It’s really the experience that makes people experts. Studying phenomena in textbooks is one thing; seeing them unfold before your eyes is another.

We have labs and practicums and internships to try and make up for what textbooks can’t teach, but let’s face it: students spend a significantly larger percentage of time in a classroom or textbook than they do in the real world. In a lot of ways, it seems pointless.

But it’s not, and I know that, and I believe that, or else I wouldn’t be spending my parents’ money (thanks, parents) to get a college education. College isn’t pointless, and people understand that. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to be a university student— to write essays and read articles and listen to lectures. It’s a privilege to have experts, people who have put in the work and gotten the experience and learned lots and lots in their life, sharing their wealth of knowledge with us.

College is also so much more than academics. Yes, academics is the reason people pay for college, but the environment of a residential college is unlike any other environment people will ever live in. The stage of life university students are in is incredibly unique. It’s a time of the least responsibility and most freedom many people will ever have. It’s the first step out from under a parent’s wing and into the world as an independent individual responsible for their own actions and the development of their own identity.

All of this, of course, is supposed to prepare people to go into the world with the skills to be productive citizens and bright minds. But I’m not sure anyone ever really feels prepared— for college, for a job, for responsibility.

One day, though, you find yourself reading an article as part of the research for an essay you have to write, and you realize that you can understand what it is discussing (the Spiritual Pathology of Adolf Hitler, if anyone was curious) when a year ago you would not have been able to. This moment is when I realized that although the rhythms of academia can often feel redundant and useless, they’re not. By going through the rhythms and the exercises, we are slowly acquiring the store of knowledge and skills necessary to read increasingly more complex literature and to write increasingly more analytical essays and to think increasingly more probing thoughts. We learn how to think and how to question, so that when we go out into the world we know how to learn.

Thus is the world of academia, thus is the world I am currently emerged in, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.