On any given day at The University of Alabama, countless classes are conducted, hundreds of tests are taken, and thousands of plans are made for the coming weekend. With so much going on amongst the 30,000 college students, it can be easy to forget that there is an entire world beyond next week’s chemistry exam or Saturday night’s big football game.
Often our obsession with life’s mundane details get in the way of our ability to view a bigger picture of more than 7 billion people living in almost 200 different countries across the world. If we count the hundreds of little conflicts, triumphs and emotions that make up our complex lives and multiply that by 7 billion, the expansiveness of the world we live in is simply unfathomable.
Society mythicizes college as a life-altering place where individuals go to acquire an education, but more importantly go to expand their horizons, grow in experience and figure out their true identities. Naturally, there is a certain amount of maturity that comes with moving away from home and straying from the oppressive rays of our parents’ watchful eyes, but this alone is not enough. Sure, college somewhat expands our horizons by providing us with exposure to people with backgrounds and beliefs different from our own. Still, this is not enough.
As the next generation of the world’s innovators and professionals, we should take advantage of all the resources that college offers so that we might gain in experience and truly grow as people. One of the most important resources that we are afforded is the opportunity to study abroad. With options to do two-week sessions or entire semesters in countries from Ghana to Greece, the study abroad program at Alabama can be made conducive to all majors and all types of students across campus.
And while we might argue that we are simply too busy to go abroad, the reality is that we aren’t too busy, but rather we are too comfortable. It takes only one semester for the newness of college to expire, and without realizing it we have suddenly descended into the dark, bottomless pit known as routine.
We come to college to get an education, but it is important to recognize that not everything can be learned through listening to lectures or memorizing facts. It is only when we are thrown completely out of our comfort zones and forced to adapt that we can break the curse of complacency and truly learn from unique firsthand experiences.
Often when I walk through the clouds of smoke engulfing B.B. Comer amongst the throngs of foreign and exchange students, I wonder what they must think of our culture in America or even our culture at The University of Alabama. I imagine that many of our practices might have come as a shock to them, but I can only admire their courage and resolution to come to a foreign country and make it home.
They’ve taken the first step in avoiding the type of slow death that comes from falling slave to habit, following the same routes everyday and refusing to change paths. And that’s more than most of us can say for ourselves. So before we decide to spend the entirety of our four (or more) years of college exclusively in the city of Tuscaloosa, we should take time to consider that by remaining stagnant we are only limiting our experiences and ultimately contributing to our own slow deaths.
Tara Massouleh is a freshman majoring in English and journalism. Her column runs biweekly on Thursdays.
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