Thoughts on my history of math and science.

So I'm graduating on Saturday. St. John's being St. John's we don't have finals and it feels much more like we're just kind of gliding to a halt than anything else. They've given us, as they do, copies of our original admissions essays for our consideration.

I'm finished with my tutorials, which is interesting because it means that, unless I go back to school - which I hope to, though I'm not quite sure in what - I'm done with formal study of, well, everything, but especially math and science. I've taken four years of math and three of science past high school.

When I was in high school, first looking at colleges, I wasn't sure what I wanted to study (I'm still not, for what it's worth). Journalism was a possibility, as were English, poli sci, international relations. In any of the programs I was looking at, at any of the schools, I would have needed maybe a semester or two of economics or statistics, sociology or psychology. I would not need geometry, algebra, calculus, physics, chemistry, biology - none of that.

Then I found St. John's, and while I was hesitant at first I couldn't shake my interest. It looked like there would be no way I could avoid a challenge, which was appealing, and it looked absolutely nothing like high school. That really appealed to me. In high school we sat at individual desks with text books and listened to the teacher talk from the front of the room. At St. John's there were no desks and, really, no discernible front of the room, and the first class I sat in on, a Greek class at Annapolis, the teacher sat at the table along with all the students, they addressed each other as equals - and the only people to write anything on the board were students. This was someplace that was not about furthering professor's careers or producing the best statistics or training students to do something in the future. This was a place that was about learning, all sorts of things, solely for the sake of learning. Study was the end, not the means, and if what you studied didn't land you a dream job right after graduating, that didn't matter, because that wasn't the point.

So I ended up here, and it didn't work out too well at first, because I hadn't figured out the above. I knew St. John's appealed to me, more than other schools, but I hadn't figured out why, because I had no idea what I wanted to do in life. Two of the most important events of my academic career happened between May 2005 and December 2005: I interned at a newspaper (and realized I didn't want to work in journalism), and I got kicked out of school. It's not quite technically true but practically speaking, I flunked out.

So I went, and ended up in London - which was fantastic - and I did lots and lots of thinking about why I liked St. John's, and what I wanted to do with my life. And then I came back, and it wasn't really smooth sailing, but it was smoother, and eventually I found my footing again.

What have I gotten from St. John's?

Well, there's the numbers. Four years of my life. A huge amount of debt. Too many books.

I've gotten a grounding in evolution and genetics, general and special relativity, quantum physics, electricity, mechanics, ancient Greek, literature, philosophy, French, music, chemistry, theology, and anatomy. Will I ever use any of that? Maybe. Will I use the skills I learned along the way? Definitely.

I think, ultimately, the most that I've gotten out of the whole experience is doing it. I've studied Einstein. I've spent three hours on a Saturday trying to get a science experiment to work. I've slogged through ridiculous Greek verb conjugations. I've sat and had serious discussions about the Bible, about Dante, and about philosophy texts that need to be broken down word-by-word to be understood.

Honestly I don't know what that adds up to. I know it adds up to something, some significant change. Maybe I would have gotten it at any other school but I doubt it; I certainly wouldn't have studied Gregorian chant and quantum mechanics elsewhere. I was scared of a lot of what I studied, but I studied it, and usually I learned it, and there's something to be said for that.