The Eternal Student

As the name of the blog implies, this chronicles the adventures of this particular eternal student. I know there are a lot of eternal students out there, as this term is very broad, and it has numerous definitions.

One type of person who falls under this category is the student who finds a way to never leave college. These people have a knack for staying in school for an unbelievable number of years without being booted out. They enroll in the minimum amount of classes possible, drop them when needed, and change majors quickly, just as one department plans to kick them out. They have an uncanny ability to maneuver through the university's system to be able to extend the maximum residency rule, sometimes to a double-digit number of years. When the university finds out about their overstaying existence and finally gives them the boot, or their parents just get tired of paying their tuition, they manage to find a job that will support their student lifestyle. So they go to their jobs, then rush back to the university in their free time to hang out with their decades-younger classmates or orgmates. This situation is more easily maintained if the job they've found is in the university itself.

Another type of person who can be described as an eternal student is one who has taken to heart the maxim "the classroom is not the student's world, the world is the student's classroom", and has no compunction about actually saying it out aloud in public. These people think of everything as a learning process. ("He broke by heart when he went out with my best friend, but at least I learned something from the experience" or "I got talked into investing my life savings into a pyramid scheme and now I'm broke, but the experience really taught me a lesson") They're not really optimists, they're just adept at managing to get an education out of bad judgment or rotten luck.

I probably have some characteristics of both these types, and share some qualities with a lot of others. I think of myself as an eternal student not just because I always claim to be of student age, but because I feel there's always something to learn. Not in the profound sense as in "There's so much to discover in the world" or even in the practical sense as in "I want to learn Latin". It's more that I often find that there are just a lot of things I don't seem to know, as in "The deadline is TODAY? Why didn't anyone tell me that?" or "How was I supposed to know you can't make a left turn there?" I like the concepts of learning by doing and trial and error, and for the most part I just like finding things out my way, even if it turns out to be the hard way.

At any rate, there is always much to learn and much to know, and for this eternal student, the euphoria of reaching the eureka moment after an arduous process of knowledge and discovery is always followed by the feeling that I should have just read the freaking manual instead.