It’s been a few weeks since graduation, and this is my attempt to sort through the mess. Which means this piece will probably come out looking a bit like a mess. I hope you enjoy reading my messy thoughts, though, because why else are you subscribed to this newsletter?
My freshman fall, I spent a few hours each Monday afternoon in the Bostock Library Reading Room — with one class at 10:15am and another at 7pm, I decided it wasn’t worth commuting back to my dorm. There, I researched Duke and wrote emails to professors and students about math and politics, inspired by my first-year seminar, taught by my soon-to-be degree advisor. I added my notes to a document that I titled “Random Interesting Things about Duke. That doc is now 163 pages long (let me know if you’d like a copy).
Those lonely hours shaped me more than I would have ever realized. I honed my discipline, grew comfortable with rejection, and improved my writing ability. Yes, through emails.
One of those emails (after a follow-up attempt or two) went to a professor studying the mathematics behind gerrymandering — who would become my thesis advisor and close mentor.
Another went to a professor teaching MATH 221, which combined linear algebra and proofwriting (I had not learned either). On the last day of the fall shopping period, he took me off his waitlist. My first midterm was a failing grade; my second, 50 percentage points better. I asked him for a recommendation for a scholarship I was applying to called the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program — he agreed wholeheartedly.
A third went to a then-senior studying the same combination I was interested in, also a Robertson scholar. After several helpful conversations, he agreed to help me prepare for the interviews. We met at 10pm on a Friday below Marketplace. He toured me around UNC-Chapel Hill (a key aspect of the program is its dual citizenship at UNC) after I told him I earned a full-ride offer.
I scheduled my classes closer together for future semesters — to free up my dinners for time with friends, peers, and mentors — while continuing to send those emails.
My friends and I had gathered on a school evening to talk about life, and we eventually challenged each other to make something happen for ourselves. With their tailwind at my back, I emailed a city council member, Leonardo Williams, and asked if I could write speeches for him. He agreed to meet the next day to talk more. Four years later, he’s the Mayor of Durham, and I count myself lucky to have been a small part of his work.
Obviously, the way I’m writing about my season of email-sending is a romanticization, maybe even a caricature. I’m sure that while I was writing, I was wondering why I didn’t go outside and make some new friends. But I do remember enjoying it.
I’m choosing to frame my reflection of college in this way because those emails embodied a brand of fun that I came to embrace. I craved fun from fulfillment, not just frivolity.
After college, I went on a scholarship-funded NOLS course, canoeing 83 miles on the San Juan River, a feat that my instructor called Type 2 fun:
Type 2 fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect . . . Riding your bicycle across the country. Doing an ultramarathon. Working out till you puke, and, usually, ice and alpine climbing — REI, of course
I had never heard the term before, but I had surely experienced it plenty. In my view, Type 2 experiences have a roundabout, nonlinear way of providing. Providing clarity — intellectual, moral, or otherwise — and catharsis.
Math classes at Duke aren’t easy. I probably spent 20 hours a week on some of them. I barely remember what I learned. I remember high-fives and tears after my friends and I had finally figured out the thing that led
to the thing that led
to the kernel of a solution to something that may never directly impact my life ever again.
My first move after college — to a speechwriting agency in DC — implies I felt at least a twinge of regret at all the time I spent constructing math proofs. It’s a question that begs to be asked, and I see it on people’s faces all the time, although it’s rarely verbalized.
Not really, I don’t. I like to think these classes bubble underneath my conscience, infusing my decisions with an untraceable yet unmistakable capacity to reason.
I’ve been asked in interviews how my technical math background relates to my writing aspirations, and this is probably the essence of my answer. It’s certainly not fully satisfying, but at least my math classes were fun in retrospect.
While I ended up finishing the requirements for my math degree, I officially pursued an individualized degree combining my math + politics interests. Since these were separate degrees, I had to choose which would count as my “official” degree, even though I had completed both. I chose the individualized degree.
I ended up listed on the math program as a first major anyway, so I tried and spectacularly failed to walk at the departmental graduation. This involved borrowing a friend’s robes, tripping as I joined the procession, and hearing the person behind me called before me as my hilarious vision of farming two official degrees from this university fell just short.
Intimate with yet ultimately estranged from disciplinarity — I’d hoped for nothing less.
Receiving a college scholarship upended my relationship with college. I stopped crunching those college ROI numbers and started taking more risks.
When I stopped thinking about how my decisions projected into my professional future and started aligning them to my well-worn values, my decisions became more professionally fruitful.
For instance, the scholarship’s co-curricular funding allowed me to travel around Europe and Southeast Asia and reflect on this very blog. One fall, a friend I had met during my semester at UNC, who had subscribed during the summer, asked me to help with a writing project on gun safety. My interesting classes started to become another opportunity to write. That project realigned my professional ambitions away from academia and toward a more accessible form of writing.
I used my last morsel of funding to circumnavigate Japan and Taiwan by bike (literally fulfilling the REI definition of Type 2 fun). When they asked, I’d tell people I met that my scholarship paid for the travel. Their reactions, often incredulous, didn’t need a translation; they spelled out for me, plainly and clearly, how lucky I was and am.
There’s so much more to say. I could have talked about my SOL experience; or my first summer, in Whitesburg, Kentucky with the Letcher County Culture Hub; or my switch semester at UNC playing for their marching band (which I wrote about here); or my time abroad in Singapore; or my D.C. summer; or the many, many transformative classes that I took while at Duke and UNC.
But these three facets of college — emails, math classes, and scholarship-funded travel — bubbled to the surface so quickly that I couldn’t help but write them out.
Cheers!
Such a great read Andrew ! Inspired by your google doc !
Love to see how far you’ve come brother!