Auyon Mukharji
What Just Happened?
In sixth grade, I played baseball. I got on base once over the course of the entire season. I spent the rest of my time deep in the outfield, investigating the contents of my bellybutton and eating dandelions.
When I was thirteen, I tried out for a league soccer team in Kansas City, my hometown. Within the first five minutes of the tryouts, I had an asthma attack on the field and had to be escorted home by my mother.
In seventh and eighth grade, I played basketball. Towards the end of those two years, I scored my first two points. Everyone in the stands stood up and cheered. They did not think they would ever witness such an unlikely event.
It soon became clear to both me and my parents that sports would not make a significant contribution to my college application. With this in mind, my mother told me three things the day before I entered high school. She told me “Auyon, don't drink alcohol. It will rot your brain, and we both know that’s about all you have going for you.”
The second thing she told me was not to speak to girls. She described them as a distraction. She was right.
Finally, she told me “Auyon, these next eight years are going to determine the course of the rest of your career. Life is a competition, and if you want to succeed, you are going to have to work harder and smarter than everyone around you. Your nose needs to be down to the grindstone and you cannot afford to let up at any point.” And that’s precisely how I viewed high school. I worked hard. My teachers liked me. My parents liked me. I liked me. My baby brother hated me. I’m told you can’t win them all.
But upon my arrival at Williams College almost four years ago, something happened. It certainly wasn’t immediate, but over the course of my first three years at Williams, there had occurred some serious changes in my work ethic and motivation. A good deal of this I can attribute to the fact that my freshman year, I lived next to Suranjit Tilakawardane, esteemed College Council Vice President and sole Astronomy major of the class of 2007, but not all of it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that the shift I experienced, resulting in my current inability to adequately focus on anything of import is a direct result of simply existing at Williams College. Any sense of logic or rhetoric that I may have possessed before attending Williams has been turned on its head and spanked until it died a glorious purple and gold death. We attend a school where the most scandalous parties are thrown in a renovated church, a House of God. In a town where the residents vehemently oppose even the idea of fast food restaurants, while everyone’s favorite eatery was, rest in peace, Subway. A school where we students spend the entirety of our “educations” attempting to hide our drinking habits from security and the powers that be, only to arrive at the last week before graduation being force-fed alcohol by the college until we are more drunk than thought humanly possible. We go to a school where nothing makes sense. And, as a result, by the time we reach our respective senior year, we view the world through a strange lens, a perspective colored by our shared experiences in the Berkshires. This, I believe, explains why our alumni are such a tightly knit and incestuous bunch — no one else understands us. Love it or hate it, Williams is now an inherent part of the way we all will interact with the world outside, and in me, at least, that discovery has manifested itself as a pronounced inability to take anything too seriously.
I certainly don’t mean to downplay the extraordinary academic program we’ve all enjoyed for the past four years, which, along with the generous alumni-giving rate, has made us the number one liberal arts college in the universe. I do wish, though, that there had been some sort of warning, somewhere on the Williams admissions website, or even in the Prospectus. Maybe something below a picture of friendly kids playing frisbee, just a little caption: “Attending Williams will warp your mind. We also have club sports.”
I know that Williams has not affected all of us the same. I know that some of us are entering the real world as well-adjusted, mature individuals. I am not one of those people, nor have I ever met any of them. But I have heard they do exist. It said so in the Prospectus. I, on the other hand, have grown from a studious, well-mannered and respectable young freshman into the irreverent, ruggedly handsome senior you see standing before you today. When I was home over a recent break, my mother described me as, and I quote, an embarrassment and a hooligan. I didn’t know what to say, so I just smiled at her. Thanks, Williams.
It’s easy for me to be disappointed, or even enraged, at the state that Williams has left me in. I have no real marketable skills, and I am clearly unfit to enter the work force at any point in the near future. And yet, somehow, I feel ready. And I think that enthusiasm to venture off into the unknown is entirely a result of my education at Williams. Whether it was wading through chapters of dense philosophy readings that made no sense to me, or attempting to comprehend the cluster housing system, Williams has made me comfortable with not only the unfamiliar, but with that which I lack the ability to understand. Now, rather than getting frustrated with impossible assignments, as I might have as a first year, I do my best to have a good time doing them, and get no more emotionally invested than that. I’m excited to enter the real world next year, because I am confident that no matter how little sense it makes out there, I know I’ll feel right at home.
I would like to leave you all with the story of my last exam at Williams. The class was field botany. I had been performing rather poorly in the class up until this point, but had studied extraordinarily hard for this particular test, at the expense of other classes, as I knew it would be my swan song. The last part of the exam consisted of flower identifications. I had expected five, maybe seven different flower families. As I walked into the last room of that exam, and realized that there were 35 different families of flowers that I would need to identify, I started laughing. I laughed not because I knew was going to fail my last exam at Williams. I laughed because if I had to fail that last exam, there was no place I would rather do it than in a room filled with flowers.
Best of luck, Class of 2007. I’m excited to see all of us on the other side.
June 3, 2007