Boys, Be Not Ambitious! > IDEAS & IDEALS

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Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the position to give advice or counsel to the students individually as well as collectively on their problems concerning their study, future career, and life. Very fortunately, I find, most of them manage to solve their problems quite successfully without my help, finish their study and military duty, and leave the campus with a diploma in four or more years. Afterwards, they get a job, married, have children, and live happily.

     But, not all of them. There are always a few who have some particular difficulty in adjusting themselves to the new environment they find in the college. They are usually more intelligent, morally conscious, and invariably more ambitious. It takes them more time, and even painful effort to adapt themselves to the college life, all unnecessarily. Often I see them disappear from the class, with or without reasonable excuses, before they get their diploma. Hardly I hear from them again. They do not send Christmas cards for me. They never call. I wonder what have become of them all. I wish I could meet anyone of them by chance on the street, and hear his or her story. Very unfortunately, I have not heard a good news from any of them, so far.

     Again, with the opening of the new semester, I am going to confront new faces in the campus, full of hope, expectation, and ambition. But I know that beneath or behind those shining faces, there also lurk fear, dread, and anxiety for the life lying ahead. Of course, I have my professional cures for them, but I keep them in secret to myself for professional reasons. I usually prescribe only a small dose of them every time I feel I need it for the patient.

     I decided to change my policy this year. I decided to publish the prescriptions or the formulas in The Chung-Ang Herald, the prestigious monthly English newspaper in the campus. When a freshman knocks at my office and enters with that serious and confused face, I will shoo him away out of my office with a copy of my newspaper article in his hand before he opens his mouth. I feel tired of repeating the sermon. I will not, of course, divulge all of my business secrets and items here. I am also sort of a businessman. Here are a few of them:

     Get used to the freedom given to you as quickly as possible. Freedom is a good thing, but for those who are not accustomed to it, it can be a burden, an embarrassing burden. Freedom is a divine thing only when you know how to use it and enjoy it. Take time to make it yours. It will take time. But don't worry too much about it. You have already become quite easy with it. You will not go back to the lousy highschool days, will you?

     Don't be particular. Do as other students do. When they submit their homework papers, submit yours with them. No professor will read carefully each of the papers. It is highly probable that he will check your name. The content or the quality of your paper is not that important. You are a fool if you fail to meet the deadline in order to hand in an excellent, better and more conscientious work. When you go to your professor with your paper at his office individually behind the deadline, he will surely be angry for being disturbed in his accustomed sleep on the sofa after lunch, and he will revenge you by trying to find fault with you and your paper. Don't do it.

     Don't cut classes. If you start to cut classes that you find are uninteresting, boring, and useless, then you will eventually come to the situation that you have to cut almost all the classes that you are supposed to attend. Just be there, and answer the name-call without fail. That is the most important thing in the classroom. You don't have to be alert all the time before the boring professor. Take your seat in the back so that you can read the newspaper, or comic, or doze, or sleep. Professors are usually quite advanced in their age, and they do not pay much attention to what you are doing back there. But no snoring!

     Don't expect too much from the professors you will meet in the college. Much better if you expect nothing from them at all. Professors are those who earn their bread for their wife and children by selling his knowledge, just like your highschool teachers. But unlike highschool teachers, they do it in more respectable and dignified way at higher price. You are deadly wrong if you expect them to be much different from your mean and petty highschool teachers. Teachers are teachers, whether they teach in the highschool or in the college.

     Get ready to be disappointed in the college life. The earlier, the better. No college in the country is ready to meet and satisfy your vaguely strong intellectual demand or curiosity. But hang in there! Don't quit! If you go down, down, and down, and hit the bottom, then there is nowhere for you to go but up. Start from there.

     Bear deeply in mind that the diploma is the only thing and everything you can get from the college. Remember that college is not your permanent home. You are one of the so many visitors who come and go incessantly. You can not finish anything during your stay in it. You will eventually learn more in the University of Life. What a college can give you for sure is the diploma, and you should not, and must not jeopardize the chance of getting it with any cause, reason, or excuse, however noble and sacred it may be.

     And lastly, What you get ultimately from the four-year college life is the psychological advantage over those who have none of it. And this advantage can not and must not be underestimated. College life is more experience than education. Education in it is a small piece of the big pie, but the experience you make in it is unique to it. You can learn and know much more about Paris without visiting the city than the tourists of the city can do, but you can not say publicly about the city with authority and peace of mind, unless you have been there, even for a month. With your own experience in the college you will not worship, nor despise its value, all unnecessarily, as they often do who did not go to college.
          (February 21, 1984)