強哥

If I Were a Freshman AgainThomas Arkle Clark

It is the habit of age to give sage advice to youth. One of the pastimes in which everyone periodically indulges is the pleasant hallucination that if he were given the opportunity to live his youth over again he would do it differently and more successfully. We are all of us, even though we have no more than reached middle age, given to regretting our neglected opportunities and our lost youth. It gives one a virtuous feeling in imagination to dodge all error, but it is extremely doubtful if many of us, even if we had a second chance, would avoid many of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, or follow a straighter path than that by which we have so far come. If it is merely pleasant for us to conjecture what we should do if we had a second try at it, it may be profitable for those whose who are younger to listen. If only foresight could be as accurate as the backward view!

If I were a freshman again I should not work so many hours as I did. I put in enough hours with my books in my hands, but I did not accomplish much. I had little concentration. Many students whom I know, and I was one of this sort, spend a great deal of time in getting ready to work. With a book in hand they look out of the window at the clouds or at the pretty girls passing along the street, and all the time they deceive themselves with the idea that they are working.

Many an evening, when the work was heavy, I would determine to begin early and get it over with, but I could spend half an hours in arranging my books and getting myself seated in a comfortable chair. All this time I imagined I was working. I spent as much time in goading myself no to duties that I should have liked to shirk or in getting ready to work as I did in actual labor. If I were a freshman I should plan my work, I should try to develop concentration – I should work harder but not so long.

I should learn to work with people about me. As it was, I lived a somewhat isolated life. I did my reading and my studying alone, and though there were some advantages in this method, there were serious objections. Now I must often work under different conditions from those by which I was surrounded.in college; there is work to be done where there is no quiet, and I do it with difficulty. As I tried on a crowded ocean steamer to put these wandering thoughts on paper I was constantly annoyed by the confusion about me and by the spasmodic attempts at conversation made by a well-intentioned but misguided young man at my side. If I had learned to work under different conditions I might have turned the conversation aside as a steep roof sheds the rain. I believe it is a great advantage for a young man to do his work himself, but he should not subject himself to the slavery of doing it alone.

I should take as a a freshman, if I had my work to do over again, more work that I have no special fondness for or that I find difficult. I like an easy time as well as any one, and I do not wish to give the impression that I think it an error for a student to follow the profession he enjoys or to do the work he likes. In point of face, I believe that a student should choose those lines of work along which his tastes lead him. I think it very likely that those things we do most easily we shall do best; but I have found that training comes through struggle, and that people are developed most who resist most, or who struggle against difficulty and opposition and overcome. I have known a good many geniuses, but they generally had the most commonplace careers because they never learned to do difficult or disagreeable things.

Students come into my office every day who want to get out of work or to drop a subject, or to cut a class exercise for no better reason than that they find the duty difficult or the instructor or the subject is dull. Much of the work of life is not pleasant. Half the things I am forced to learn to give these things and things I dislike doing. I have been forced to learn to give these things my best attention whether I like them or not, I wish I had learned in my freshman year to do more such things.

Just yesterday as I was sitting at the breakfast table talking to a young freshman, in whom I have a rather vital interest, as to next year’s course, I suggested a subject which I thought good for him to take. “Is it easy?” was his first question, and when I answered in the negative his interest waned. In the world in which we must in time work there are few easy road, few snap courses. We shall be forced to do a great many hard things. If I were a freshman I should learn to do such things early.

Like a great many people, I suppose I am not now doing the work that as a college student I planned to do. I am in no sense a fatalist, but I am convinced that men have their work chosen for them quite as often as they themselves choose it. If I had supposed that I should be called upon to speak on the most unforeseen occasions and upon the most unfamiliar topics, I should have given myself while in college the practice which I believe is the method everyone must employ if he is to become a ready speaker. I have learned that, sooner or later, every intelligent man is called upon publicly to express his ideas, and no matter how abundant these thoughts may be, he will suffer much pain and have little success unless he has had pretty regular and persistent practice.

I ran across an old classmate last spring, an engineer of no little repute, whom I had not met since the day of our graduation. “How would you change your course,” I said to him, expecting that he would long for more mathematics, “if you had it all to do over again?” 

“I should learn to write and I should learn to speak,” he answered, “and I should begin as a freshman. As it was, I avoided every opportunity to do either, with the idea that only ministers and lawyers have need of such practice, and I suffer for it every day. My boy is to be an engineer, but I am going to see that he does not make the mistake that I made.”

When I am called upon unexpectedly to speak and my knees shake and my voice falters, and the word that I long for comes with difficulty, or fails to come at all, I agree with my classmate, and I feel sure that if I were a freshman again I should learn to speak correctly and without notes.

I wish that as a freshman I had learned to play well some athletic games. It is not entirely for the pleasure that I should have derived or should be able to derive from the fact that I feel as I do, though that would mean much. If a man succeeds, as all hope to do, he gets into a business which is likely to be cruelly exacting, and he demands some relaxation in which he finds pleasure. For me there is no pleasure in hitting a bag that simply bounds back to struck again, or in pulling up a weight that drops stupidly and inertly down to be raised the second time. I would rather hoe in the garden, saw wood, or beat a carpet hanging on a clothes’ line in the back yard. I find no virtue in any of the machinery or in any of the “system” devised by shrewd inventors for keeping the human system in ideal working condition. If I am to have pleasure in exercise, and I will not take it from a sense of duty only, it must be in a physical contest where something definite can be accomplished where I have a goal to attain or an opponent to beat. I would rather play a good game of tennis than agitate all the exercisers in Christendom. I think there are few things that help more to keep men young and strong, and ready for the aids materially in bringing about the condition. One may learn, of course, late in his college career or even after he is out of college; but pride and awkwardness, and the manifold duties of the day come in and prevent one’s doing so. If one does not develop some skill while a freshman he is very unlikely to do so later.

If I were a freshman I should determine to do some one line of work well. As I remember, I was principally concerned in “getting through.” I think I was not quite so modest in my scholastic ambitions as the young fellow who told me not long ago that a “pass” was as good as one hundred per cent to him, but as least I was not so much concerned about doing my best in some one line of work as I wish now I had been. Practically every college man, freshman included, is rushed with his work. He takes more “hours” than he should, or he neglects to prepare the assignments at the proper time, so that when his work is done it is done hastily. Nine out of ten freshmen are behind with assigned work. I have known fellows even to go as far as to argue that it is an excellent practice to get behind, for of one is to catch up he must then force himself to do a large amount of work in a short time. I grant that this may be a good thing, but work done under such conditions usually shows all the earmarks of slovenliness and superficiality. There are many subjects in which I think it would be sufficient to merely do good work, but at least in one subject I wish I had made it a point to take time to give the matter careful thought, and to do it as well as it was possible for me to do. One has to rush through work far too often later in life; it would be a comfort to remember that at one time at least I had deliberately taken time enough to do an assigned task well.

I should make more of an effort that I did to get acquainted with my instructors. The conception of the average freshman is that the college instructor is a somewhat abnormal mortal full of knowledge – sometimes – but without much understanding of the individual or sympathy for him. Some are; and some of this sort expended their time on me when I was a freshman. I thought as a freshman that the less I bothered my instructor the better, and if by some good fortune he was ill or out of town I put it down at the end of the day as one of the blessings for which to return thanks. I came in the end to see that my instructors – even those who at first had seemed most impossible – were pretty human creatures, with a wide knowledge and a generous willingness to help. The trouble was with me quite as much as with them. I count it the greatest pleasure and benefit of my college course. How much more it might have meant had I come more closely into contact with the real lives of the other men and women with whom I worked.

If I were a freshman I should not lose an opportunity to see and to hear the prominent men and women in public life who for one reason or another come to every college town. I was often hard up or “broke,” and I could easily find an excuse for not going to lectures, or the theater. Now I regret that I miss opportunities which never came again. I had always wanted to hear Henry Ward Beecher, but when he came to town the dollar that was required to get into the lecture hall seemed big to me, and I decided to wait until the next time. But the next time never came, for Beecher died soon after, and it is one of the regrets of my college life that I missed my chance to hear and see so great a man.

I am wont to say when giving advice to young men just enter college that one thing a freshman should give his time to is study – all other things are relatively unimportant; yet if I could be a freshman again I should try to be more interested in general college activities. Social matters such as connect themselves with young women I think the freshman may very safely postpone until later in his college course. The affairs of the heart can easily wait. Studies are the main thing, but not the only thing, and the freshman who fails to develop some outside interest is usually making a mistake. The mere bookworm is not so likely to be successful as the man who gets out among his fellows. Valedictorians often have very commonplace careers because their interests are too narrow and their knowledge of human nature lacking. If I were a freshman I should have at least on avocation – one thing that should give relaxation from my every day work and bring me into close contact with men.

What this side interest should be depends, of course, upon the individual freshman. It may be athletics if he shows any skill in this direction; it may be religion, or oratory, or politics; but I believe he will be better off if he goes into something that helps him to study men as well as facts.

It is a delightful experience and a great opportunity to be able to spend four years in college, but it is one I may not have again. I made some mistakes, I missed some opportunities; but after all I am not sure but that the things I got are better than the things I missed, and if I had it all to do over again who knows but that I might lack sense to do it as well as I did it before? I am content to let things be as they are.