The Carletonian

For my last Carletonian article, I will attempt to bookend my time at Carleton by responding to the first writing I ever did for Carleton, my application.  The first ever sentence I wrote for Carleton in my application letter was “I am a physicist.”

There’s an adorable little lie that we tell ourselves when we attend a college like Carleton.  We tell ourselves that we’re really here for the classes; that what’s important are the grades, the majors, concentrations, and the future potentials that they suggest.

I’m in Italy, therefore I must write an article about travel.  To be honest I never used to like travel, in fact you could say I actively disliked it.  I was a pretty pretentious preteen and the thought of being dragged off to another city (much less country) was absolutely silly when I had a perfectly capable brain that functioned quite well in my hometown.

I think TED talks have become one of the silliest sideshows to happen to legitimate academic thought in the last half century. There, I said it.  I’m sure that one won’t win me many supporters but I think it’s true.

Since it has been “major declaration season,” I thought I’d write on a similar topic: special majors. Getting a special major approved is a tough process. I know because I’ve been on both ends of it, as a student preparing to apply and as a member of ASC looking over petitions and determining which merited further processing.

Last week I attended the Game Developer’s Conference where I listened to my personal heroes give some of the most inspiring talks I have ever heard.  The conference had to be 80% male, 80% white, and 80% young people.

Innovation is all the rage these days; it’s the buzzword that makes the money, gets the endorsements, and makes the world move forward.  It seems like anytime the economy gets brought up, innovation is not far behind.

We do a lot of theorizing at Carleton, and I understand that sometimes that theorizing gets extremely tiresome. The standard seminar format is to bombard us with conflicting views on an issue, whether it’s literary theory or sociology, and expect us to spontaneously generate our own conclusions about it.

If you can imagine this, I was the kind of teenage boy who draws a lot of his self-image from his Extracurricular Or Hobby, which in my case was a writing workshop that I went to every Friday at a youth center in Ann Arbor.

This world, where the individual seems to be becoming increasingly unimportant, the epic (as a social phenomenon) seems to have originated from the desire to feel as big and important as the other things going on around us.

Success, according to Stephen R. Covey, can be measured by a ladder leaning against a building.  An excellent manager is highly efficient at climbing up the ladder.  He has learned how to maneuver each rung and make his way to the top step by step, making sure he concentrates completely on the current move before transitioning to the next.

Fun.’s “We Are Young” won a Grammy for “Song of the Year” last Sunday, and appropriately so. It’s been played seemingly non-stop since its release, and the chorus—“Tonight, we are young / so let’s set the world on fire / we can burn brighter than the sun”—is undeniably catchy.