The Opportunity to Stop Exploring

I didn’t realize until I started filling out my plan of study how terrified I was of the future. Not the whole future, exactly—I’ve always been fairly optimistic about having a generally happy life—but of making choices. I have known since high school that I was really interested in music and languages, and was fairly certain that I wanted to study linguistics and music in college. I made my college decision based on that fact (as well as on the ridiculous good luck of having gotten into Harvard), and I wrote my college essay on my observations of the relationship between language and culture in Russia. Yet somehow when people asked what I was concentrating in, my answer always had a qualifier—“I think I’m doing a joint in linguistics and music.” When I was feeling insecure, this qualifier would turn into a long string of maybes—“I think I might be doing either music or linguistics—or maybe a combination?—something along those lines. I still haven’t decided. We’ll see.”

The week before plans of study were due, these maybes spiraled into an internal monologue of doubts. How is this all going to fit into two and half years? Isn’t a joint concentration just a half-qualified version of each? Who would hire someone with such impractical interests? How am I expecting to join two different fields in one thesis if I can’t even figure out how to work the online student portal?

The scariest part of this week for me was not finding things I was interested in; it was eliminating the option of saying “maybe.” I’m not sure what I was afraid of; possibly that other people (who presumably all have both practical and impressive concentrations, and work to cure cancer) would say “Oh... linguistics and music...well, I guess good luck getting a job and succeeding in life?” Or possibly that I would choose the wrong thing—that everything up until now had been moving me further and further from some unknown life goal, but there was still time to turn back! All I had to do was to find that secret calling (which in my head was always something more practical, like economics) and put it in my plan of study, and have the wonderful, successful life that might not lie at the end of a music-linguistics path.

And yet so far no secret calling has emerged from the depths of my psyche. I didn’t have any great moment of regret or post-submission panic, and so far all the reactions I have gotten from friends and acquaintances have been enthusiastically positive. (Of course, it might be that people are being polite, but I’m going to choose to take their enthusiasm at face value.) And something else happened that I didn’t anticipate: turning in my plan of study made me feel secure and established. Eliminating other options has given me two fields—and one plan—that I can really call my own.

I feel like this is closely tied to something that I see people all around me doing, and that I know I struggle with—trying to achieve breadth and depth at the same time, convinced that if we try hard enough we can choose everything at once. Maybe—if we’re just hardworking enough—we can become concert pianists and world-renowned scientists and Olympic skiers, and still have time to sleep and see friends once in a while. What, it’s not working? Just draw out a more ambitious schedule for the week and try harder. And what we’re sacrificing—along with sleep, or exercise, or a social life (or, sometimes, all of the above)—is the security that comes with finding a niche, and focusing our energies in order to excel at one thing. If we try to pick everything, we will only be a fraction of the pianist/scientist/skier we could have been, and what’s more, we will be a pianist/scientist/skier without a sense of purpose—without a feeling of home. Declaring a concentration does mean sacrificing an exploratory period, but it also means setting down the doubts and indecision and lack of stability that comes with exploring, and hopefully realizing that you’ve found the field you went in search of in the first place.

Lauren E. Goff ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint music and linguistics concentrator in Currier House.