How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago. (The "suggested" word limit is 250, and I'm around 520, but I have seen accepted applications with essays way over the limit.)
Okay, that may have been too cavalier a translation of UChicago professor Andrew Abbott's 2002 "Aims of Education" address. Rather, he says that "there are no aims of education. The aim is education." Being educated is not a means to a future end; it will not guarantee a happier, wealthier life. It is for nothing but the present.
At first, I wanted to rebel against this wishy-washy wordplay; of course we must use our education for the future! Then I thought of the hours I spent browsing UChicago's website for Neuroscience research abstracts and UCIHP's pre-health opportunities--hurtling towards medical school before even being admitted to college, just as I've immersed myself in college preparation all throughout high school. Instead of "using" my education, I was hurrying to get through it to reach whatever came next.
Professor Abbott acknowledges that some people can and will go through school "mechanically" and will perhaps become doctors, whose day-to-day work is mostly routine and requires no groundbreaking revelations. So if I can still reach my goal, why even bother with education's mysterious true purpose? I have already woven together my intended path here. The versatile quarter system allows me to double major in Comparative Human Development and Neuroscience, fields that supplement each other in studying human behavior at the molecular and societal levels. I will be constantly drawing upon and fine-tuning knowledge from those courses with year-round treks shadowing Chicagoland physicians and the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division's summer research programs. I will familiarize myself with humanistic aspects of medicine through the Katen Scholars Program's community health outreach and ameliorate the real-world consequences of healthcare inequality with the Urban Health Initiative.
These experiences will be thought-provoking and fulfilling and will bestow upon me critical skills for the future, but I will be doing myself a disservice by seeking them only for the fixed entity of becoming a doctor. The aim of education is indeed not for the future or a career, but for refining myself in each passing moment. I have to rise above the idea of undertaking endeavors only for the sake of deriving some form of tangible advantage from them. Career plans deviate and skills needed in a profession change from what we learn in school; what endures is the flexibility of mind that earns no outside recognition but is invaluable in making me a more well-versed and intellectually dexterous person. Some would call this elevated view enlightenment; at UChicago, I will call it education.
I am still digesting the erudition of this address, but that I must fight to understand it validates Professor Abbott's point. The problem sets, the curriculum, the Core are simply tools. Education cannot be given, it must be discovered. Beyond simply providing the tools, UChicago strives to constantly improve its most intrinsic ethos and inquires deeper to reshape education itself. It lays bare the truth as a challenge to its students: Will you puzzle over why enlightenment slipped by in your complacency, or will you cultivate our resources to command your own revolutions?
And truly, I thought you would never ask.
There is no point in going to college.
Okay, that may have been too cavalier a translation of UChicago professor Andrew Abbott's 2002 "Aims of Education" address. Rather, he says that "there are no aims of education. The aim is education." Being educated is not a means to a future end; it will not guarantee a happier, wealthier life. It is for nothing but the present.
At first, I wanted to rebel against this wishy-washy wordplay; of course we must use our education for the future! Then I thought of the hours I spent browsing UChicago's website for Neuroscience research abstracts and UCIHP's pre-health opportunities--hurtling towards medical school before even being admitted to college, just as I've immersed myself in college preparation all throughout high school. Instead of "using" my education, I was hurrying to get through it to reach whatever came next.
Professor Abbott acknowledges that some people can and will go through school "mechanically" and will perhaps become doctors, whose day-to-day work is mostly routine and requires no groundbreaking revelations. So if I can still reach my goal, why even bother with education's mysterious true purpose? I have already woven together my intended path here. The versatile quarter system allows me to double major in Comparative Human Development and Neuroscience, fields that supplement each other in studying human behavior at the molecular and societal levels. I will be constantly drawing upon and fine-tuning knowledge from those courses with year-round treks shadowing Chicagoland physicians and the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division's summer research programs. I will familiarize myself with humanistic aspects of medicine through the Katen Scholars Program's community health outreach and ameliorate the real-world consequences of healthcare inequality with the Urban Health Initiative.
These experiences will be thought-provoking and fulfilling and will bestow upon me critical skills for the future, but I will be doing myself a disservice by seeking them only for the fixed entity of becoming a doctor. The aim of education is indeed not for the future or a career, but for refining myself in each passing moment. I have to rise above the idea of undertaking endeavors only for the sake of deriving some form of tangible advantage from them. Career plans deviate and skills needed in a profession change from what we learn in school; what endures is the flexibility of mind that earns no outside recognition but is invaluable in making me a more well-versed and intellectually dexterous person. Some would call this elevated view enlightenment; at UChicago, I will call it education.
I am still digesting the erudition of this address, but that I must fight to understand it validates Professor Abbott's point. The problem sets, the curriculum, the Core are simply tools. Education cannot be given, it must be discovered. Beyond simply providing the tools, UChicago strives to constantly improve its most intrinsic ethos and inquires deeper to reshape education itself. It lays bare the truth as a challenge to its students: Will you puzzle over why enlightenment slipped by in your complacency, or will you cultivate our resources to command your own revolutions?
And truly, I thought you would never ask.