My friend graduated this past December and last week she passed on her cap and gown to me for use in exactly five months. Right now it sits in my closet awaiting, as I do, the culmination of four years' toil...or sixteen, depending on when you start counting!

This quarter I am taking Agricultural and Economic Development 597.01, the so-called capstone GEC (Issues of the Contemporary World) required of B.A. candidates. [Apparently B.S. students do not need to be aware of the contemporary world?] Here is the official university line on the capstone experience:

The course AEDE/IS 597.01 satisfies the tenth GEC requirement, which is a capstone experience. Such courses are upper-division and thematic. In addition, they draw on multiple disciplines and enrich the students’ experiences of the contemporary world. There are two learning objectives of capstone courses. One is that students “synthesize and apply knowledge from diverse disciplines to contemporary issues.� The main discipline drawn on in this course (which focuses on contemporary issues in the global food economy, including implications from population growth and effects on environmental degradation), is economics, while contributions from demography, environmental geography and political science are incorporated as well. The second objective is that students “write about or conduct research on the contemporary world.� Hence, a final paper is required.

Now, I've never taken an economics course in my life, but when I told my professor so, he said, "Good, good." And I am inclined to agree with him: I am looking forward to the challenge of investigating a new field that I happen to find interesting. University education was not originally intended to be job training; it was a continuation of the love of learning and thus included the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric (trivium); and arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy (quadrivium); all in preparation to study philosophy or theology. I've found that my most intellectually satisfying and stimulating courses at OSU were taken for my English major, a degree I do not intend to use in my career (for the time being, at least). As much as I sometimes grumble against the GEC, my Art History and Linguistics courses introduced me to whole new areas that I would have happily pursued given infinite time and resources. People always comment on the broad difference between my two majors, but I feel like by taking both I have truly learned how to think, not just what I know. Knowledge will always be superseded by new discoveries and conceptualizations, but the ability to think about and process that knowledge is enduring and thus, in my view, much more important.

Note: Ask me again how I feel about this course three weeks in when I'm up to my ears in reading!