Final Year… and Still Learning.
I must say I find it both relieving and disheartening as I introduce myself to the new faces on campus as a college senior. On the one hand, I am grateful that I am almost at the end of my undergraduate journey, but on the other, I feel as though this chapter of my life has just flown by without my noticing it. As I laugh with my peers about how I feel like an old man, an ancient creature on the Hardin-Simmons campus when watching all these young, naïve (not it a negative sense) freshmen scurrying across the forty acres – my stomping grounds for the past three long years – I also reminisce about the good times I have had on this campus.
The person that I am today is far different from the one that stumbled upon the Hardin-Simmons’ campus grounds on that fateful day back in August of 2007. Indeed it would be almost an unrealistic goal for me if I ever decided to sit down and list every single aspect of my personality that has changed over the time I spent in college. This is far too complex a task, not because of the sheer quantity or the volume of change that has occurred to me, though it is safe to say that the transformation I have undergone is rather vast. The reality is that the changes I have undergone really no longer allow me to see myself – the person I am today and the person I used to be – with the same lenses. In other words, there are certain values and ideologies that have so influenced and altered me that I can no longer look back and evaluate myself objectively. Additionally, it is my nature to forget that what I hold on to now as a belief may be starkly different than what I believed before. For this reason, I can easily deceive myself into thinking that I’ve always thought this way about something.
For the most part, I think that all these changes during my time here pursuing my dual degrees in Bible and Psychology have shaped me to be a better person. As I approach graduation, it is my sincere hope that the future holds for me even more opportunities to grow and improve as an individual. After all, being daily sandwiched between my past and my future, it is only through learning that I would have any chance of altering my tomorrows and making use of my yesterdays.
"Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime" - My time at HSU has taught me the importance of being a lifelong learner.
If none of what you just read made any sense to you, then hear this: the most important lesson I have learned in my tertiary education is that the learning never stops. The second lesson being that it is only through putting into practice that which I have learned that I really stand a chance of making something out of my life. Unless I continue to push myself to learn and grow – even in the littlest of ways, I risk making the same mistakes from my yesterdays in my tomorrows, potentially winding up in the tragedy of an unfruitful life marked by cycles of disappointment and wasted opportunities. The truth of the matter is that the pursuit of knowledge itself really doesn’t lead me anywhere unless I learn, not just to put it into practice, but to continually obtain new knowledge. We need to learn how to be lifelong learners. As the saying goes, “give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime”. By going back and forth between learning, practicing what we have learned, learning more and then putting into practice some more we can avoid the tragedy of being stuck in one station the rest of our lives.
With one final year to go, I still find myself learning new things – even in the first year (freshman level) classes that I am enrolled in. Even though I am so close to the finish line of my Bachelor’s degree, so close to walking across that stage to receive my diploma, I still find myself daily being challenged by my professors here to learn new things. They continue to inspire me – not just to learn the material in the syllabus, but also knowledge that extends far beyond the confines of my classroom. For this, I am deeply grateful because I know: the learning does not stop once I leave Hardin-Simmons University. As cliché as this sounds, “It is not the end – it is just the beginning”!
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