Tales from Turkey: Your Niche

Do you ever hear about a historical figure and can’t help but compare yourself to the legend, wondering how such a singular character, unlike anyone else, could come to be? (And wondering if you’ll ever be as interesting?)

Enter Diogenes. The Greek cynic who was said to live in a barrel, accompanied only by his loyal dog, and who occasionally wandered the streets of Athens shining a lamp, searching for a “real person” or sometimes I’ve read it as, an “honest man” among the cosmopolitans. Diogenes was from Sinop, the peninsular town I’m living in this month, where stray dogs run the streets fixed and vaccinated and taken care of by the locals. Perhaps, we muse, in homage to this man.

I walk by the statue (pictured above) twice a day and think a bit about him. Not that I know too much about Diogenes, but rather I think about his life memorialized in this city and in philosophy classrooms everywhere as a ringing reminder that I’m still not sure what to do when I graduate. Often times, I hear this question from prospective students’ parents, “How do you choose what to focus? Can you focus? What happens if you never do?” There’s nothing wrong with these questions, but the best answer for a student who is really considering Evergreen (or already decided) requires a shift of perspective.

At Evergreen, a good pattern you could say happens is students spend their first two years exploring and their last two specializing. But many students, some friends of mine included, spend their first two years super focused and their last two exploring. People like me claim to be focused but really they spend all their time moving in and out of various disciplines, doing a lot of exploring, but also taking care to produce some key projects that show focus in a particular area. Other people do it all, and end up with no focus at all.

Those are the patterns and that looks good to outsiders, or people who will not actually experience this education. For those in it, the truth is much more complicated and it comes down to questioning the broader assumption: why do you want to focus, and should you? Why should you? Why shouldn’t you?

I came to college and have pursued higher education because I love it. I love school, research papers, readings, projects, all of it, I dig it. I have friends who have come to college to get out of their low-tier jobs. They don’t really have an academic focus, they have a career focus and they are much more interested in coming to college for skills and connections and opportunities. I have other friends who have gone to college for a specific field you need degrees to work in, like medicine or music or museum studies. So, the wealth of reasons to come in the first place are numerous and none are ever the same. Sometimes, people just come here to find themselves, the learning is secondary.

The truth is, your opportunities at Evergreen to study exactly what you want to study, no restrictions, makes you focus on yourself. You are your focus. Your future rests in your own hands. As a student, you start to think about questions of focusing in this way. You wonder why you came in the first place. You wonder if you want to pursue a field as a job, or a craft, or a hobby as you’re doing it. And in the end, whether you did 6 quarters or 1 of intensive work in one particular area of interest, when you graduate you may have been lucky enough to have it mostly figured out. Your exploration and your focus, in whatever ratio you did them, will leave you with indicators for which way to go next.

I believe that not many people graduate college with such a clear and deep understanding of the differentiations between their dreams, their abilities, their passions, and their skills. Most people just graduate with a license to something rather narrow, rather too focused. For some people, I can’t lie, that works. But on the whole, I would question that model of living. A college degree is not a license. It should mean more and be more than that, otherwise what was the point? So what I would say to the student who feels confused about the breadth and depth of an Evergreen education is that you do not have to have it figured out and patterned neatly into a perfect packet. Life is not a checklist. Your experiences with your hands, which you will have so much opportunity to do at Evergreen, will do more for you than tests and texts and papers ever will. Just think, for five minutes, about Diogenes wandering the city, looking for an honest person.

Sure, he was being sarcastic and curmudgeonly. But it speaks to a greater desire within us for the authentic and the unaffectatious. I would like to think that Diogenes may at lease pause over the Evergreen student. Whether they are absolutely sure if their niche or not, I think generally we try to know ourselves and be honest with what we find.

Obviously, archaeology has gotten me in the philosophic mood. In other news from the water front, the trenches have all been uncovered at our site and we will commence with digging tomorrow, bright and early! Turkish is still beyond my understanding, but strangely enough it reminds me in some ways to Irish Garlic (thanks Sean Williams) and I have hope I’ll soon be able to remember how to say “How are you?”. Our site was visited by a beautiful tan and black dog today, who took a nap in the shade mid-morning. And, tonight I learned a little about pseudomorph, where sometimes corroding metals which have a organic material pressed against them corrode and mold to the shape of the organic, which after hundreds or thousands of years disintegrates, leaving behind (sometimes) only the perfect mold. Even the absence of data is data in this world, and I love it! As my high school English teacher would say, “Good stuff!!”

 

 

Continue reading Tales from Turkey: Your Niche

Summertime

This blog’s conception occurred at an interesting crosscurrent of arrivals and departures for me here at Evergreen. Summer is like that. I’ve lived in Olympia for three years. My zip code has been 9850-something since September 2014, and I’ve yet to encounter a summer that didn’t come packaged with some radical change.

At school, some people take this time to work as temporarily full-time staff at their student job. I know Residence and Dining (RAD, the office that runs the on-campus living) hires the most student workers of any office, and plenty of my friends kept on with their jobs in Registration, in the Library, or in Academic Advising to bridge the long four months between Spring and Fall.

So in some way, Summer Quarter can be an extension of the same. But in my case, it heralds the arrival of the new, the chaotic. If I didn’t have my jobs at Evergreen in Admissions and the Library, I’d be flying loose with stress and existential dread right now.

On Friday (that’s 7/7/2017, a great day for flight!) I will be flying out of SeaTac airport on the first leg of my long journey to the little seaside town of Sinop, Turkey. I’m going with three other Greeners and a few students from other Universities around the country to meet an equitable pool of various experts working on the Sinop Kale Excavation. The Excavation is an exploration of the seaside fort’s pre-Greek and early Greek colonial settlement directed by Dr. Owen Doonan of California State University Northridge.

I can, and will, go on and on about the unique flexibility and design of study abroad programs at Evergreen. For now, let me say that Evergreen’s ability to accept transfer credit from other institutions without fuss primarily due to the freedom of earning a degree without constraining requirements means that we can chase an opportunity like this half-way around the world without fear of disrupting our degree path or wasting our time.

This journey began at the tail-end of last summer, in mid-August. I had just finished the brunt of my Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship with Dr. Ulrike Krotscheck [Evergreen’s wonderful professor in archaeology and classics] when she sent me an email. She invited a handful of her previous students to the SKE project. I remember the rush of fear, elation, and honor I felt reading her email about the project’s scope.

I’d been lounging in the library, staring out at the rooftops of Purce Halls which were still under construction at the time, wondering if I would seriously be in Turkey in less than a year. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, or didn’t have an interest, it was that I was struck by the immensity of this proposition. I was already planning on going to Ireland with an Evergreen program in the Spring. If I went to Turkey, I’d need to find: the money to go, a place to live when I returned from Ireland, jobs in the summer that wouldn’t mind my extended absence, and the gumption to do it.

And now, I’m a little over 48 hours from departure.

This is a huge adventure. It required a lot of quick maneuvering and uncertainty, but I would say that none of it would have been possible at another college. Sure, I have basically no other frame of reference. But Evergreen has played party to the defiant, self-actualizing strain inside me that wanted my education to work for me (which is why I came here) and crafted, I think, at least 50% of the gumption it took to get me to go.

Now the time has arrived. This blog will discuss my experiences abroad, of course, but it will also be the soundboard for my final quarter at Evergreen. I’ll be talking about preparing for an ILC, organizing your schedule around work, a full-time course load, and your life (very important), and reminiscing. Fall quarter will likely be my last full-time quarter at Evergreen before I graduate. This excavation is the late afternoon of my time as an undergraduate. Thanks for reading!