From childhood to early adulthood, we are forced to attend school and become educated. Then we’re told that in order to be successful, we must go on to college. So we go to college where free thinking thrives and well-rounded individuals are formed. Or so we’re told, but this isn’t exactly the truth.

Whether you are about to finish or start your degree, you have encountered or will encounter instances when the University will let you down. You’ll have terrible professors. You’ll have classes where you just can’t learn the material. You’ll be disappointed and discouraged at some point, and higher education will not live up to its reputation or your expectations. 

As often as a university environment is portrayed as liberating, it can actuality be stifling and one-tracked. Essays must be structured this way; a text must be interpreted that. Education begins to feel like a formula where memorizing material the night before an exam to be quickly forgotten the next day and looking up a novel on Sparknotes 15 minutes before class adds up to a degree. This system makes an education less about what you learn and how you are developing a thinker, but more about how well you can jump through the hoops for a degree. 

This view is one that is all to easy to adopt. It makes education seem like a cookie-cutter commodity where key aspects of learning are lost in its exchange. Aspects of what I see as a quality education like critical thinking, innovation and creativity can seem to disappear; it is too easy to fall into a pattern of not asking the hard or uncomfortable questions we know we should. When we sit quietly in discussion sections because we’re scared to say the wrong answer and prioritize receiving a high grade over actually learning, we’ve cheapened our educations, and something has gone amiss.

But more discouraging than all of the former is when you succeed without intellectual growth. If there’s anything I’ve learned about college, it is education doesn’t always cater to learning; it will let you pass a class without actually learning the material. You’ll ace that paper you wrote at 4 a.m. 

A degree isn’t representative of ideas learned. But it should be.

As cliche as this sounds, getting a degree is much more about the journey than the end of college. How you go about getting your education can completely shape what you actually learn. Two people can graduate in the major with the same GPA, but that doesn’t mean they are as well-educated as each other; it does not mean that they have engaged in their college experience in the same ways. 

If you want a liberating and fulfilling education, you must seek it yourself.

No one is going to make your education for you. If the education system let’s you down, you share in the responsibility. You have to take initiative and make college what you want it to be. So don’t take the easy classes. Read books that are unassigned. Ask the questions that no one else will. Take the classes — or, if you dare, the major — in a field that has been deemed ‘worthless.’ Do what you want and find your passion, so you can do it to the absolute fullest. Don’t let the practicality of getting a degree overshadow your thirst for knowledge and desire to understand. Let getting a degree be about gaining knowledge and insight, instead of getting As.

When I graduate with degrees in English and classics, I want to be left feeling that I can do more than recite Robert Frost and translate Latin tattoos for people. I want to know I didn’t fall into a mindset of slipping by with the bare minimum. In a perfect world, I think that’s what we should all strive for.

The degrees any of us walk away with from this University are suppose to represent learning and competence in your field, but that doesn’t mean it will. You will have to work with the education system, so it doesn’t let you down, and so that you don’t let yourself down. You only get what you put into this University, and you only get one journey through this time where your main priority is to learn and grow. But you have to make that happen for yourself. Whatever stage you are in your education, make the most of it. That is to say ‘carpe your education,’ and don’t miss all that it could offer to you.

Audrey is a junior in LAS. She can be reached at [email protected].