My Approach to Academics, In Review

The following are two pieces I’ve written over the past few years that, when put together, provide a chronicle of how the pursuit of multidisciplinarity has shaped my college experience so far. The first is an editorial that I wrote for my high school newspaper during the spring of my senior year. The second article, which I wrote as part of an application to my major program, shows how Wash U has, so far, helped me keep as many doors as are practical open, perhaps even more than are practical: it remains to be seen, over the next few years, how my approach to college will impact the rest of my life.

In 1959, two psychologists, Leon Festinger and Merill Carlsmith, performed an experiment intended to prove the theory of cognitive dissonance – the idea that humans strive for internal consistency between their ideas, beliefs, values and realities. In the experiment, they had students spend an hour on boring and tedious tasks. (Sound familiar?) Some were then asked to talk to another subject and persuade him or her that the tasks were interesting and engaging. Some participants were paid $20 (about $162 today) to do this, while others were paid $1 (about $8 today). Then all the subjects rated the task. Those who had been paid $1 to lie and say the task was interesting rated the tasks much more positively than those who had been paid $20 to do the same. The participants who had been paid $20 were comfortable lying, as they had a sufficient reward to go against their values without feeling much dissonance. Those who had been paid only $1 were uncomfortable lying for such little justification; they subconsciously changed their perception of the tasks in order to keep their value system intact.

I found this study extremely interesting, yet at first it seemed removed from my actual experience in life. Sure, it was groundbreaking research in the ‘50s that sparked many more psychological studies, but how often do we actually notice these complex theories in action in our day-to-day lives? True, one aspect of cognitive dissonance is that it operates mostly subconsciously, thus making it hard to observe when it influences us or those we interact with.

Yet recently, I’ve been noticing this rewardjustification theory in my life quite often. As we prepare to move on to college and the next chapters of our lives, the subject of the future has become quite a hot topic—sometimes overly so. We’ve all been asked countless times what we want to be when we grow up, but as the prospect of growing up looms closer and closer, I’ve seen my own answer and the answers of those around me called into question, wavering and changing as the future draws nearer. Students who used to answer with titles like “artist,” “author,” “musician,” “ballerina,” and “ice-cream taster” now say things like “stockbroker,” “hedge fund manager” and the vague term “consultant.” I’m not totally naïve; I know that not everyone has a lucrative future in tasting ice cream. But I don’t think that the prospect of making a whole lot of money should totally outweigh our true aspirations and make us forget about where our passions really lie. In Festinger and Carlsmith’s experiment, they showed that just $20 was enough of a justification for people to internally override the value of honesty. It’s natural to want to do as well for ourselves financially as we possibly can. But I believe that pursuing intellectual and creative passions is as much of a value as honesty, and that we lose a great deal if we let wealth supersede everything else we value and care about.

In college, what I really want to do is major in ancient history, comparative literature, or philosophy, all synonymous with “unemployed.” However, I also want to make money. Those two conflicting desires create cognitive dissonance. One can negate dissonance in a few different ways. I could major in one of the “unemployed” fields, and become a writer who may be creatively fulfilled but also living in my parent’s basement. Alternatively, I could wholeheartedly pursue wealth, majoring in economics or stock brokering or consulting or whatever the majors are called that lead to Wall Street, thereby acting like Festinger and Carlsmith’s subjects and letting wealth be enough justification to put my passions in the back seat (of a luxury sedan). Yet there is a third way to resolve dissonance: by reconciling the two ideas in conflict. I can major in economics and ancient history, though there will be more coursework. I can go to medical school and get a doctorate in philosophy, though I may be very busy and very tired. I think that oftentimes people, especially my peers, forget that they may not have to choose between prosperity and passion – it just requires creative planning, open-mindedness and a willingness to put in a good deal of extra effort. By combining the pursuit of affluence with the pursuit of our passions, we might make a little less money than we would solely focusing on wealth, but we’d keep our values intact and, in the end, have much less dissonance clouding our minds.

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“The Laws of Physics are Frame- Independent” was the title of my textbook on relativity. During the final few weeks of my first semester in college, I learned about the ways that space, time, and light interweave to form this curved thing that allows for existence. There were equations for the way that an object changed size when it moved near the speed of light, and formulas explaining how two events could be simultaneous to a person moving at one speed, and separate for a person at another speed. Sketches of the earth, entangled in my various ideas of what space-time might graphically look like, peppered the margins of my physics notebook.

Meanwhile, the framework of a mythological universe became illuminated in my classical literature class. I followed Aeneas on his journey to the underworld and back in Virgil’s Aeneid and the transformations of women into trees, cows, and rivers at divine whims in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I met Virgil’s version of the Cumaean Sybil, a fearsome divine being, one day, and Ovid’s humanized, tragic version the next. Both told the same story of the Sybil guiding Aeneas, but each painted a radically different picture in my mind.

What I learned in both classes was highly conceptual, difficult to absorb and even more difficult to fully comprehend. Whether it was working through a special relativity problem that required stretching my mind beyond currently extant technologies or deciphering the underlying ideological implications of one of Ovid’s myths, my coursework took a lot of time and brainpower.

The results were more rewarding than anything I had ever experienced. As my brain synthesized these theories, equations, and stories, I felt something that I had never felt so viscerally before: a tangible expansion of the universe. Of course, it was only my own perception that was expanding, but looking up into the sky or through the pages of a book felt palpably deeper, more full of possibility. Ideas and images and words that had previously seemed contained within themselves opened up to a newfound relativity in my mind, sparked by the relativity of two Sibyls, of two flashes of light moving along the space-time continuum.

The awareness of relativity, in this broader sense, is the most profound impact that my studies have had on me so far, and taking challenging courses at school has continued to strengthen it. My coursework is often immensely challenging, and if I was only motivated by a grade or the brief blip of accomplishment that comes with completing an assignment, I do not think I would have stuck it out on the pre-medical track. The thing that keeps me going in these classes, and deeply enjoying them, is the feeling I get when I can take what I learn and form new connections with it, especially beyond the classroom. That sense of accomplishment is rooted deeper than a single grade, test or paper, and continues to motivate me even as I sit here writing this article, far from class or any pressure to compete. The idea of frame-independence— that the things I learn, whether they are mathematical relationships or sonnets—can be related to each other in constructive ways that can expand my own mind will, hopefully, help me add something, some new combination of ideas and formulas and myths, to the world.