I’m not your average coed. I don’t live on campus, I didn’t participate in “Rush Week” and I don’t wear shorts or tank tops to class. Or ever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not judging—there’s nothing wrong with any of it—it’s just that I’m not your average college student. I hear the question, “Are you a faculty member?” often. And I don’t mind. In fact, I think it’s cool. And yes, I know that college kids don’t say “I think it’s cool” anymore, but that’s my point, because I’m a lot older than most of my classmates and back in the day, Gen-Xers like myself used the word cool a lot. Or rad.
I first went to college in 1984–before laptops, cell phones and intersectionality existed on college campuses.
After three years, I still could not figure out what I wanted to focus on, so I left with a promise to myself that I would return to finish what I started. I gave my college interruption a year. Maybe two. I told myself: I’m going to successfully live my life. I’ll work, travel and start my life outside of college. I’ll develop friendships with people very different from me. I’ll read important literature and go to movies and plays. I’m going to do all the things my oppressive upbringing prohibited. And in this process of simply living my life, I’ll discover all the blind spots in my academic and life education.
It takes me thirty years.
Well, what can I say? I’m the proverbial late-bloomer and it’s really working for me. I keep thoughts of crushing self-doubt mostly under control, I’m an A student and my classmates love me. I’m the “mom” at school who gives them all the supportive love, affection and lecture notes they want, with none of the judgment they may receive at home. In turn, they help me stay young and hopeful. They tutor me with today’s lingo, too.
Admittedly, I can’t call the experience entirely a “glow up”. Putting off college until middle-age includes its downsides. My first semester back, in 2017, I got bombarded with experiences completely foreign to me. Slowly, it became somewhat overwhelming. For starters, automation: my application, registration and orientation happened online, not by mail or in person. I didn’t step on campus until the day that classes began. Then, I could also choose online classes which didn’t even exist when I last attended school.
The most jarring aspect of college for this Gen-Xer?
The culture of hyper-individualism. From getting to choose my preferred pronouns to go from Latina to Latinx—so many identities out there for the taking—I found a different world. Again, don’t get me wrong. More inclusivity not less I say. Ironically, this cultural trend results in more isolation, not less, which fascinates. We’re all out there, choosing self-segregation based on our secondary identities. How did that happen? Why did a system of inclusion result in exclusion? What’s really going on here? So many questions.
Inquiring minds want to know (another expression from way before your time).
Granted, it probably doesn’t help that school in general organically breeds cliques, but our current trend in hyper-individualism, as I see it, results in a double-down on cliques—in college and beyond. In other words, we privilege hyper-individualism over the greater community. Or as your humanities professor might say, we privilege the particular over the universal. More questions: How does this trend solve our isolation problem? How can we honor the particular—white, black, brown, straight, LGBTQA, etc., without sacrificing the universal—human? Throw in Covid-19 making isolation a necessity for survival and the question of identity takes on a new meaning. Talk about ironic, huh?
The fundamental question of identity—specifically, individual or citizen?—defines our historical struggle as a nation so it stands to reason that that struggle should continue today. I often ponder questions about how I can contribute to a solution. These questions make me hopeful for the future and that’s why I came back to college because college inspires questions (thanks Socrates!). Am I going to find any answers? Some, certainly. But inevitably, I’ll also find more questions because, to use a current turn of phrase on campus and beyond, the struggle just got real.
