The end of the beginning

Has it really been a full semester already? Wow, that means I ought to have a new-found wealth of knowledge stored in the recesses of my mind, a deeper insight into social and cultural happenings, higher-level thought capacities and a, errr, bigger profounder grander more copious vocabulary reflective of my extensive hours of reading, writing and discussing academia with far more intellectual people than myself. They say the mind is a sponge, soaking up every bit of information within reach...well what they neglect to tell you is that sponges have a point of saturation, where every new bit of information either forces other information to drip away unnoticed or sheds itself in angry disapproval of its crowded living quarters. I hit that point about mid-November, right before I began working on my final essays. Bad timing.

I always heard my friends mention this type of frustration when undertaking their Masters, shrugging it off as weakness on their part. Now here I sit making the same proclamations of information overload. Let this be my official apology to you friends for my previous lack of validation of your hard work. I feel you.

That said, I have to consider this a successful first semester. Or at least until I receive my final marks next week. Thankfully, not all learning comes in the form of grades and marks, nor even in an expressible cumulative bank of information. Rather, much of my learning has been experience. Experiencing new people and places; experiencing a culture vastly different from my own; experiencing an upper-level academic program; but most of all, experiencing personal transition and growth throughout it all. Maybe that's really the key to higher education. Expanding on the sponge analogy, maybe education shouldn't be reduced down to drops of information added to the cumulative and limited whole. Maybe it isn't even new ways to thinking that produce a denser material capable of holding more or thicker liquids. Education (one could call life itself an education) is about recognizing our sponges as alive, growing, reshaping to fit the experiences of our lives. It's only when we cut the sponge that its capacities are limited. That mid-November realization of saturation coincided with the realization that my sponge was still growing, in fact it has always been saturated by an ocean of experiences, alive in a constant state of progressive development. Okay, too much with the sponge analogy?

So what does that all mean? Just that I'll always aim for increased knowledge, intellect and academic achievement, but experience and growth will be the ruler measuring success in my life rather than calculable and static performance. The end of the first semester may have arrived, but remember, its still just the beginning.