Kelly Soderstrom
Political Science/International Relations
Boulder, Colorado

When I graduated from high school, I knew that I knew everything. I was on my way to a fantastic school with a full 12 years of knowledge under my belt and I felt like nothing could stop me from reaching my goals. Now that I stand before you four years later, about to graduate, I know I don’t know enough. Somehow, over the course of my four years at Carleton, I managed to seemingly lose vast amounts of knowledge.

Where did all of this knowledge go? In Terry Pratchett’s 1989 novel “The Color of Magic,” all of the knowledge that students lose while attending university ends up in the library. As much as I admire the vast array of knowledge available in the Gould Library, I doubt it comes from the minds of over-eager freshmen.  As absurd as Mr. Pratchett’s ideas about the source of knowledge in libraries may seem, they do hold a grain of truth. The longer I studied at Carleton, the more I realized just how much knowledge actually existed in the world. Anthropology, biology, calculus, political science—they all became connected in an infinitely complicated web that expanded past any horizon I could see. My anthropology class studied the merits of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis while my linguistics class an hour later criticized that same hypothesis. Theories vital to one subject proved to be invaluable in another. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “rational choice theory” in my classes, I could actually afford my tuition. All of these connections are confusing, yes, but enlightening nonetheless. These connections taught me to question knowledge—all knowledge—and make educated, rational decisions about which truths I chose to believe.

After discovering the infinite connections between all of my academic subjects, my curiosity grew. I wanted to know how math connected to philosophy and how art influenced chemistry. Autonomous subjects became points on a spectrum and rival disciplines became rowdy siblings living under the same academic roof.  As an International Relations major, I spent many introductory classes discussing how much political science overshadowed the field of economics. I then began to take economics classes and discussed the merits of economics over political science. As the debates continued, I began to realize that political science and economics are inextricably connected and therefore cannot be compared in any competitive setting. Everything mixed together into one large colorful mass of information. Subjects no longer had stark boundaries, but melted together into mutually dependent pools of understanding.

Suddenly, a previously untapped ocean of knowledge opened up in front of me. All of these connections gave birth to hybrid fields that I never knew existed. Political economy and cross-cultural psychology opened an infinite number of new learning possibilities. If someone had told me in high school that I was going to write my senior thesis on political psychology, I probably would have laughed and told you that it wasn’t a real field. Well, apparently, it is.

These connections then moved past academics as I realized connections in other parts of my life. Skills I learned in broomball translated perfectly to IM soccer and taekwondo footwork prepared me well for the hammer throw. Teamwork skills I gained playing rugby helped me navigate the struggles of group class projects. Programs for my job as a Student Wellness Advisor became quite handy as a Resident Assistant.

On the other hand, all of these revelations about the connected nature of the universe made me realize just how much I actually didn’t understand about the world. I stand here knowing that our job as students is never really over which, quite frankly, is frustrating. But buried in this frustration is a sense of happiness in knowing that we can continue to discover new things for the rest of our lives. New faces, new skills, new experiences all connected in this huge new world of possibilities. We didn’t lose our knowledge to the dark corners of the first floor of the library--we just realized where our knowledge stood in the world and all of the possibilities for learning in the future. It’s not that we have lost our knowledge; it’s that we have realized that the past 16 years are just the beginning.

Carleton has imbued us with an insatiable sense of curiosity and the intellect to understand and prudently analyze our surroundings. We now understand how ideas interact and how to navigate the overgrown jungle that is the world of information.

So, I guess Mr. Pratchett was ultimately wrong. We’re not leaving Carleton with less knowledge, we are leaving Carleton with the knowledge that there is so much more to learn and the tools with which to learn it.