Aroop Mukharji, Class Speaker
Advice From My Father, or, The Audacity of Alumdom
Before I entered college, my father told me, “Aroop, at Williams you will be surrounded by some of the best and brightest students in the nation. The relationships you foster will enrich your education and broaden your perspective. Pay attention to your peers,” he said. “They are the next generation of leaders.”
I could not help but recall my father’s words in the fall of my first year, when I was walking through the frosh quad and came upon a cheering crowd encircling two of my friends, who, for anonymity’s sake, I will refer to as Brian Dolezal and Samuel Empson. I waded through the masses to discover that Sam and Brian were boxing each other. When I looked more closely, I noted that they had forsaken traditional boxing gloves for store-bought turkey carcasses that they wore on their fists. I observed the spectacle for a few minutes, my confusion punctuated by the occasional, unmistakable slap of raw meat on skin, followed by roars from the crowd. “Could this,” I asked myself, “be the brilliance and maturity to which my father had alluded?” Maybe he was thinking of a different college.
But maybe that’s not fair. The transition from high school to college can be difficult and stressful, often resulting in strange and incomprehensible behavior. First-year students cannot be expected to exemplify the establishment to which they have just matriculated. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to consider recent graduates, our elder peers, those who have suckled the proverbial teat of Williams for the entirety of a four-year, undergraduate experience. Yes, their success out in the real world will surely give some insight into how this esteemed institution shapes the leaders of tomorrow.
The first alums who come to mind are Auyon Mukharji and David Culver Senft, two of my closest friends and graduates, Williams 2007. Auyon is my brother and Dave was his first-year roommate. At Williams, they boasted impressive resumés and were generally well-liked. They both played sports, sang a cappella, and were heavily involved in student life, Auyon as a JA and Dave on the Rape Crisis Hotline. Auyon also went on to win the prestigious Watson travel Fellowship on his first year out. Model Williams students. But the question is: where are they now? What are they doing with their Williams-enriched lives? Well, Auyon and Dave still live together, so that hasn’t changed. My brother works at a pizza shop to pay rent, and his most recent financial accomplishment has been to qualify for food stamps. Needless to say, this has made Mama and Papa Mukharji quite proud of their little Williams graduate.
Dave has been equally successful. After shamelessly following other people around on their travel fellowships, Dave returned to the United States of the unemployed. Two years after graduating, Dave is still technically jobless, and consistently challenges our assumption that he even graduated at all. He spends a majority of his time on a couch in my co-op house at Williams, inventing “start-up companies,” making websites for campus organizations, and playing internet games with my housemates.
So what happened? Where did these two slip up — go wrong? What in their respective educations led to this point? Who’s to blame? Professor Bernhardsson? Maybe Dean Roseman? Dare I suggest, Morton Owen Schapiro? I want to know who’s responsible. Auyon had plans for an M.D./Ph.D. program and Dave was as aspiring architect. While supposedly pursuing careers in music, they now sell pizza and design the sailing team website. After graduating cum laude in Biology and Mathematics respectively, my brother and Dave want to be rock stars. I suppose even Williams College can’t help but lose a few through the cracks.
So maybe my dad had it all wrong. Maybe it’s not my peers and classmates or, god forbid, my older brother, whom I should be emulating. Perhaps I should take a good hard look at the people who are running this place: our revered faculty, staff and administrators. Real adults.
Then again, sometimes it seems like even those adults have no idea what they are doing. They just do what feels good and see if they can get away with it. At some point in Hopkins Hall, for instance, one adult said to another, “You know, Nancy, I really like the idea of kids living in little groups. Little kingdoms. Governing themselves. Always have. Always will. What do you say we make them do it?” Bam. The cluster housing system is born. Adults pull that kind of stuff all the time. Why is it that off-campus housing is often closer to the center of campus than on-campus housing? Why was Walden Street made one-way to relieve traffic in an 8,000 person town? Why do professors give mid-term exams in the final week of school? Why did I fail my final exam in math? Adults.
So here we sit, on these hallowed grounds, with our little hats and black capes, awaiting a piece of paper validating our work here. I try not to think about it too much. It gets me agitated. I feel like I’m getting away with something, like there should have been something more I picked up. So I look to my parents, my teachers, my mentors. And I realize that they are the ones who designed this whole system, so a good lot of help they are going to do. I do take some solace, though, in knowing that there isn’t a particularly high bar set for when we do become adults. You can really just do whatever you want. So what should we do?
Let’s not forget who we are. We are liberal arts students, which means we have few, if any, practical skills, but are the consummate jacks-of-all-trades. We are primed to do anything from pursuing rock stardom to moving to France and becoming an apprentice at a pastry shop. So maybe Auyon and Dave have it right: chase something you love, and see if it works out. My mom certainly doesn’t think so, but she’s an adult, so we can’t take her too seriously.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have been hearing a lot about the current economic crisis. But maybe this is not an economic crisis. Maybe this is an economic opportunity. The truth is that a lot of the jobs that used to be readily available to Williams grads are no longer around. But that makes a whole host of avenues that we may not have previously considered a little more appealing. Maybe even viable. Chasing your dreams doesn’t seem so crazy anymore. So let’s do what we want. And if that means sticking our hands into frozen, dead animals and boxing the beans out of each other, so be it. I’ll see you in the quad.
Best of luck, Class of 2009, and thank you.
June 7, 2009