In Pursuit of Knowledge - Day 3

One day, I sat silently under a little tree. The tree was barely my height, and the ones around it were so much taller, reaching far up into the sky. But I liked this tree because it felt relatable. It was growing at its own pace, just as I was growing at my own pace.

When my friends at university were sprinting ahead to reach their career goals and would stress day and night to meet their deadlines, I was just taking it one day at a time. I didn't have all the answers back then, as I was only growing. How could I have sped up my growth when I didn't even know where it was leading me? My friends would ask me why I was so unsure, confused, and indecisive about what I wanted to do in life, and I would have no satisfactory answer except to say, "Because I don't know where my life is leading me yet". There was immense pressure on us to choose a career or life path as soon as possible and then to keep pursuing it without any hint of wavering because that was equivalent to failure. Any swaying from the chosen path was seen as a failure as it would prove that your character is not strong enough to stick it through.

My Peruvian-American friend was an interesting guy; he changed his university major about five times before he had to choose one to eventually graduate. He started in computer science, then went into engineering, then philosophy, which took a turn into statistics, before he finally graduated with a bachelor's degree in Economics. An unconventional educational path, no doubt, but not one in my opinion that showed him to be of weak character, as I knew him to be one of the smartest students in university. He was not only aware of various academic fields but also paid keen attention to his surroundings, and the current times that he was in, and was, as a result, a more growth-oriented person than I had ever encountered in university. There were so many students there that were narrowly focused on their own field of study to the degree that they had completely cut themselves off from what was going on around them, from other ways of thinking, or even from interacting with people who held perspectives other than their own. However, that was definitely not my cup of tea.

The dream that I had ever since I was a kid was to become a polymath, and I believed that going to university would help me do that. I had learned about this term a long time ago and had been amazed to have found out that some of the greatest people in history that we look up to such as Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Avicenna, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Al-Biruni, to name a few, were all polymaths. We may remember them for one or two unique fields that they contributed to the most, but they were all in fact well versed in multiple subjects and could draw knowledge from a wide variety of subjects to solve complex problems. Da Vinci was not only a highly skilled sculptor but was also a mathematician, scientist, musician, engineer, architect, botanist, astronomer, painter, paleontologist, and cartographer. In fact, one of his quotes expresses his take on knowledge;

"To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."

Setting that as my goal going into university, I went in with a very open mind ready to learn across multiple disciplines as wide as my mind could experience. I wanted to study science, mathematics, art, philosophy, engineering, computer science, languages, literature, history, economics, technology, politics, and whatever else was out there to learn. I was hungry for it all. However, when I entered into the world of university, I learned that there was a thing such as higher-tier subjects/degrees which tend to belong to one of the four letters of the abbreviation: STEM, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Of course, medicine is always a league of its own. As for the rest of the unfortunate subjects such as history, psychology, philosophy, literature, arts, linguistics, economics, international relations, and hundreds of others, they were all deemed as "general elective courses", which were considered to be easy and often useless subjects and had to be taken to fill in the credit hours of otherwise heavily practical STEM degrees. They provided a kind of soft cushioning for the otherwise mentally draining course loads that many students had to take on.

Starting out in engineering myself for the first year and a half of university, I tried my best to accept that my former childhood dream of studying various forms of knowledge was unacceptable here and that I had to embrace the hierarchy of academic disciplines. I too started to become influenced by the dominant perception of certain subjects such as the humanities and liberal arts as amounting to nothing more than 'soft' and useless degrees. Even the teacher of one of my favorite classes, "Introduction to Philosophy" joked about how he was probably going to end up working in McDonald's after he graduated with his master's degree if he couldn't land tenancy in university, because who needs philosophy graduates in the job market? However, the strangest irony for me was that while the humanities touched on some of the most core issues that we face and have faced as a collective in this world, which I found essential to study, they had been casually stripped of their value due to the job market and economics of today's world, instead of heeding to the crucial knowledge that they hold for young minds that need it the most.

I knew I needed that knowledge. I knew that my mind was not made for narrowing the kind of knowledge that I could receive, and despite what was deemed appropriate, smart, and with the times, I quit my engineering degree in my second year of university, and embarked on a whole new journey; I entered the field of the accursed humanities. My academic journey went from "weed out" mathematics and engineering courses to philosophy, history, computer science, Chinese, Japanese, linguistics, anthropology, gender studies, classical studies, ethics, information technology, politics, international relations, literature, East Asian studies, language development, Native American studies, Greek and Roman studies, as well as mathematics, physics, and engineering from my first year of university, among others. I forced my own way in to achieve the dream that I had and as a result, would often end up in classes where no one could fathom what a humanities student was doing because it was perceived that the humanities were for those who weren't smart enough for STEM courses. But that wasn't my case. I was taking coding classes alongside linguistics, languages, philosophy, and history, and I didn't see them as being in opposition to each other. I saw all of these subjects as being part of one whole integrated body of knowledge, and I wanted to access all of that integrated knowledge just like the polymaths that I aspired to had also attained.

I realized soon enough that the higher education system, much like our society, had stopped believing in the value of creating truly integrated human beings, but were instead narrowly focused on producing job-ready humans whose knowledge was only relevant to the economics of the time that they were born in, and disconnected from the vast body of collective and universal knowledge that is humanity's heritage. When I realized that I could not depend on higher education to guide my career path, it followed that I could not depend on society to guide my life's path either, because neither of these institutions seemed to believe in the value of interconnectedness, when my goal has always been, unbeknownst to me, to become an integrated human being.

Reflecting on this journey now, I know that I wasn't confused or uncertain when I tried multiple disciplines and was drawn to a wide variety of subjects. I was simply trying to, as DaVinci said, "realize that everything connects to everything else". Realizing and acting on this principle of interconnectedness has been leading me in my life thus far and that is why I know that my path could not have been and will not be one that has already been crafted out by rigid institutions, academic or otherwise, but will be one that I will have to craft out on my own, just like I crafted out my own version of a polymath-like education system in my university.