Too Cool for School

When the Best Years of Your Life Take a Little Bit Longer

By Matthew Knuti

Click to see full size
illustration by Johnny Lin
Image

What's the point of college? Doe-eyed students embark for college dreaming of late nights, great friends, a corner office and an education. Breathing life into these expectations in the face of the realities of a particular institution is no small challenge, one that is often as much of an education as the academics themselves. This is especially true if that institution is Brown and you are staring down the New Curriculum.

Many journey through Brown in the four years directly following high school, but no one wants to be a tool of the establishment, so almost as many take their sweet time. Brown indulges this choice by making a leave of absence easier than stealing cutlery and table settings from the cafeteria. In the blood sport of trying to be original, it's almost hard to say who's a conformist and who's a rebel. According to the Dean of the College's web site, "about 40 percent of the undergraduate population takes a leave at some point in their academic career, and about 90 percent of those who report back assure us that this was a good idea."

The numbers, and merely the prominent position on the dean's web site, go to show just how mainstream leaves of absence are and how important they can be to the Brown experience. By way of comparison, the same site states that between 450 and 500 students study abroad through Brown in a given year, or under ten percent.

The gap year between high school and college, almost de rigeur in Britain, is still something of a novelty, even at Brown. Perhaps incoming first-years are genuinely too excited to start their college years to wait, or the inertia of their peers' or their parents' expectations leave no room to consider a break.

Jeff Lugowe '07 illustrated this when he explained his leave saying, "I envisioned chilling out and relaxing in a year off that I should have taken after high school; learning in an entirely different way, about myself and approaching an intellectual challenge differently than I have in my entire life." Like many, his year spent primarily learning Polish in Krakow on the Kosiuszko Foundation's dime was initially appealing because it was not school, but he ended up "finding [him]self" and about what he was passionate to pursue academically.

Doing That Thing You Do

For most students time away from Brown, excluding summer breaks, is the first extended period spent outside of the classroom since before kindergarten when soiling ourselves was the norm. Given the possible backlog of desires, needs and whimsies, it's not shocking that some feel the need to take a hiatus and sample the 'real world,' if for no other reason than to quiet or fan our fears of the future.

Acting on that need can be a journey in itself, sometimes depressing, shameful, or contrary to the advice of family and friends. Stephanie Simons '06.5 described her parents' reaction to her decision explaining that, "they perceived that I must have been emotionally distraught, whereas I saw it as an act of clarity. Why should I be in school if I don't want to be there? I love learning, so it's not like I wasn't going to come back."

She spent her time away fighting the spread of HIV with an NGO in San Francisco and bounced around Spain and Portugal. Other leave-takers' experiences run the gamut of activities, from working a nine-to-five for the Man to growing vegetables on an organic farm. Students have taken time away to start their own companies or to be in a film. Some respond to a call to action they feel cannot wait, like Ben Logan '06.5 who took the last fall off to work as a field organizer for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. The state went for Kerry by less than 12,000 votes out of three million cast.

Some just need time to breathe and figure out why they're sending bags of cash to the Bursar so they can fake their way through classes they don't care about. Others are so in to learning that they need more time. Matt Redovan '07, for example, is taking the year off to catch up on reading. Who hasn't been in an amazing class and fantasized about reading every book cover to cover instead of just the selected chapters at best? "When I tell professors what I'm doing, they say they're jealous," Matt says. So am I.

While I did get some good reading in and improved my Spanish, I took a year and a half medical leave because I was fat and unhappy about it. The team of doctors and trainers who ran my life for a year managed to help me lose 100 pounds, and that was enough to justify my leave to me. Even so, and perhaps equally as important, I came back regretting the opportunities I had wasted. I was so excited to be in school, a concept I barely considered imaginable after spending seventeen years straight in classrooms since 1985.

The Dean Will Guide You To The Nearest Exit

Leaves come in three flavors: personal leaves of absences, medical leaves of absence (or medical withdrawal), and study away in the USA (as the Office of International Programs won't defile their dealings with domestic tomfoolery). The formalities involved in personal leave-taking are minimal and the approach of administrators is decidedly laissez-faire. The form is a page long and the approval and returning is "the smoothest process imaginable," says Lugowe, a sentiment echoed by virtually everyone I encountered.

I thought this ease could seem callous to a student in distress. On the contrary, when pressed to bad-mouth the ease with which students leave, people roundly slapped me down. Even those whose leave was in part due to dissatisfaction with Brown refused the catharsis of slander. As Mary Elston '07 puts it, "I don't care that much if the dean asks what's my problem because we have no personal connection," and that's not to say they don't ask.

Elston had a professor reach out to her who encouraged her to take a leave and find what made her passionate to be here. She left because she "really didn't like Brown" and went to Morocco. While there she decided she wanted to learn Arabic and went on to spend a semester studying in Cairo followed by a stint working in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.

Other students found advice on leave-taking from a variety of avenues and often from peers, an experience that's mirrored in the way we choose classes and more generally how we navigate the university. On returning, they often dole out advice to potential leave-takers. Simons commented that she "would get phone calls saying, 'so how'd you do it? Where do you go?'"

A dean of the College and one at Student Life both gave me invaluable advice when I came to them utterly lost. But, it was my close friends who held my hand and gave me the strength to leave when I was afraid it would permanently divide us. Indeed, most leave-takers find that the division between them and their peers upon re-matriculation is either surmountable or negligible.

Help From The (Wo)Man

On the first floor of Rhode Island Hall is the Resource Center. The welcoming space, decorated in classic institutional living room chic and equipped with corn candy, handles a variety of the most unique educational opportunities at Brown, from Group Independent Study Project to Independent Concentrations as well as leave-taking.

Chistina DesVaux '05.5 is one of two paid student coordinators for leave-taking at the Resource Center. She and her colleagues help students think out their potential leave help them take the first steps researching the possibilities and run them through check lists of things that need to be done like telling the mailroom of their address change. They organize events like a meeting during orientation to warm parents up to the idea and a potluck for returning students, although DesVaux admits "it's hard to program around [leave-takers] because we've all done different things for all these different reasons." She speaks from experience, as she studied away for three semesters at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash. and took a personal leave to travel in Spain.

She expressed how well the university's policy fits within Brown's broader educational goals, stating, "I think leave-taking at Brown really speaks to how the university has made it a priority to have students take their education into their own hands. Open curriculum, the way they advise you, and I think leave-taking, is kind of an underground part of that."

Not Just Fun And Games

The other side of the leave-taking coin is the catchall 'medical leave.' The term covers a variety of circumstances, from physical maladies to mental breakdowns. Medical leaves can be voluntary or mandated by the University, although in the latter case they are often a welcome alternative to dismissal.

Only students going on medical leave have to clearly explain what they plan to do. When they are ready to re-matriculate, they must justify their return, which generally requires a doctor confirming that you've dealt with whatever made you leave in the first place. In my case, my psychiatrist wrote a letter saying I was confronting the roots of my depression and my physician confirmed that my weight-loss regime would have made Richard Simmons proud.

Students returning from medical leave are also required to write a letter themselves explaining how they've grown, an exercise I began as a refresher on bullshitting, but which inevitably was too personal and real to be inauthentic. This speaks to the fact that, even if involuntary, which is reserved as a last resort if all dialogue has failed, it's extremely rare that students feel their leave was useless.

When asked whether students ever feel embittered about their medical leaves, Associate Dean of Student Life Carla Hansen commented, "Almost to a person, students return with increased respect for themselves, having taken brave journeys during medical leaves. [both in] how they went about getting the care they needed, and how they chose to use the time exploring things about the world or themselves that being at Brown did not allow them the time to do."

Her advice to students in distress is simple, though not always easy to hear. "It's better for you either to get some help right away than to allow you to stay in school, or to get some help right away that will allow you to get out sooner before you spend week after week while you let a semester go down the tubes." She added that the school is not monitoring our every screw-up or missed class. "We assume students are doing well unless we learn otherwise.If you are not going to class or not eating or not getting out of bed, we will not know that unless you or a friend lets someone know.At that point we can and will provide all kinds of support, that day if necessary, to understand what isn't going well, and what needs to be done."

Most people choose Brown because they want the freedom to direct their own education. Students who take leaves use them as a tool in that quest: to help them focus their goals, to find what they are passionate about, and to give them the time to appreciate how complete and how powerful that freedom is. Coupled with the fact that such a large percent of students take a leave, the clarity bestowed by fleeing College Hill temporarily is anything but shameful. When I told Robert Rutherford '05.5 that the university's records would happily drop his decimal place once he graduated he said, "I want to be listed as 05.5. I'm proud of the way I went through Brown: the unconventional way, if there's anything conventional here."

Matthew Knuti B'07 likes to recontextualize, to deproblematize whenever possible.

Back to Top

the college hill independent

http://www.theindy.com