The Right to be Wrong

I’ve been thinking a lot about right answers recently. In high school the world revolves around the right answers. We are trained, even before that, that right answers get you ahead. The best perks are saved for those of us who can figure out how to translate their right answers into tenths and hundredths of points of a GPA. Those people are the ones who are going to succeed in life. Or at least that is what we are told.

I chose to go to a college that didn’t have grades. New College of Florida was my absolute utopia for four years and I scoff at the day that I thought I wanted to go to “big state university far from home.” I can’t speak for other people’s college experience, but at least at mine, I started to develop the concept that right answers get you somewhere, but your wrong answers are valuable too. Instead of grades, we had evaluations that told us what we did well and what we could work on. So while I was learning from my wrong answers, the right answers still prevailed as a goal- something to achieve. [Read more]

Is The Bro Still Alive?

I truly value my college years, especially during my undergrad in Orlando. My time at the University of Central Florida was one of the most enlightening experiences in my life. Within those four years, I became fully aware of how much I didn’t know about anything, let alone what I THOUGHT I knew about my passions, film and literature. I was so eager to soak in all the knowledge my ripe brain could absorb. I remember vividly driving to school and being excited about going to class; I actually LOOKED FORWARD to school, a sensation I never possessed before. Every semester I made sure that I had one or two film theory classes, a lit class, a writing class, and a philosophy class to keep me invigorated.

On top of going to class full time every semester (including summer: I was, after all, double majoring), I worked part-time as a manager at a video store (an awful chain that rhymes with “Lackluster”). With that kind of heavy workload, I was very particular about how I spent my free time when I wasn’t at school, at work, or doing homework.

My extracurricular activities consisted of: playing trivial pursuit; partaking in Mario Kart tournaments; going to [Read more]