I have gone through high school and most of my life as a student despising any task that I was told to do without any sort of justification. The number of things we are given and told to do simply “because” grows with each year we age. When I was little at least the adults in charge held a level of pretense at meaning, until they had successfully trained us not to ask why. Because is there anything more annoying than a child constantly asking why? The real worry actually being, is there anything more frightening than a person not asking why? Now I realize this sounds bad on my part, but I promise I am not a terrible selfish cynic, it wasn’t the aspect of hard work that set me off, it was the taste of requirements that I could make no sense of. I watched in high school as people composed pages of resume fillers and completed tasks they did not understand. In the clubs I ran or worked on it was very easy to sort the swarms of people, to see who would drop in, take on one task, and write it down on a useless piece of paper. This hardly seems a reasonable use of time, of anyone’s time. ‘Having said that, I don’t want to lend the impression I do not work, I simply loathe inefficiency and unexplained tasks. I was not often a popular face in class, questioning the purpose and motivation of all our assignments, falling short of meeting teacher expectations of “suck-uppery” and “brown-nosing.”
As a scholar, and simply as a student, this college has afforded me a great luxury, the chance to hack away at the knowledge they store in great masses, and for an excellent rate. I despise resumes, but my love of hard work and consistent activity will leave me quite busy I am sure. Then we must arrive at the ever-present question, what is our responsibility to the community? As scholars we are indeed required to perform a set number of hours each semester, but all of this continues to prod at that overbearing query. Is it our responsibility to give back for all that we were given and everything that we earned? In many ways yes. But it is my firm belief that acts done in a compulsory nature are hardly as worthwhile as those that a person considers fully and through this understanding does in an agreeable fashion. I am excited to work for an organization that I feel is worthwhile. Supposedly we are to learn something new about ourselves in college, to gain that traditional young adult experience those movies harp on about. I hope to learn everything I can, try to maintain my grade point average and put an end to my curiosity about what exactly allows people to stop asking questions. If I fulfill this, and work hard to lend a hand to the community, then perhaps I have succeeded in my responsibility as a scholar and young adult, whatever that means.
