High Seriousness

A liberal arts college with a strong culture of participation, both in class discussion and campus activities. Passionate students with a love of learning. A holistic admissions process. Close relationships between students and professors. An American Parliamentary Debate Association (APDA) debate team or the tools to start one. Far away from my parents. Near vast mountains or in a desert. 

These are my criteria, my “boxes” for choosing a college as I finish my junior year of high school. 

My parents inform my choices in different ways; they’ve been separated most of my life, and I split my time between their homes. Though my dad didn’t go to one, he likes prestigious schools like the Ivy League because he equates them with intelligence. He’s also more interested than I am in the conventional capitalist success that Ivy graduates get access to.

My mom tries not to dictate what I want in a college, but she thinks I belong somewhere surrounded by motivated, passionate people who like to participate, and luckily, I agree. She has an unorthodox method for choosing schools: She starts with people she knows who she thinks of as good people. Not necessarily smart, or rich, or successful, but people of good moral character who enjoy learning things. She has suggested I look at the schools that those friends of hers attended. 

Books guide me too. In 9th grade, I began reading about the Beat Poets, and how schools like NYU, Columbia, Reed, and UC Berkeley were epicenters of the counterculture, passion, and art the Beats embraced. While reading Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, I found a YouTube recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his poem “Howl” at Reed College. Listening to it, I imagined being surrounded by the best minds of my generation in such a place. 

Last year, my grandmother gave me Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard, a memoir about post-World War II Greenwich Village. I was struck by this quote: “High Seriousness meant being intimate with largeness, worrying on a grand scale. There was an evangelical element in it— Saul thought of ideas in terms of redemption. Our ideas would save us from our sins.” 

I wrote that quote on the first page of the notebook where I took notes at every college tour, determined to find a place with high seriousness. I wrote it on the top of my SAT practice folder as well, a constant reminder of what I was working for. 

The hard part, though, was finding a school that actually had all of this. Inspired by how culture seemed to radiate from UC Berkeley during the Beat Generation, and partially due to its prestige (although I don’t like to admit that to myself), I became infatuated with the idea of going there. 

AI Filter

My ideals crashed into reality this past year when my Latin teacher told me that Berkeley planned to make a UC-licensed Gemini chatbot. I knew I didn’t want to go to a school that promoted AI. 

People keep saying that AI “is the future,” but I’m afraid of a future where good writing is increasingly co-opted to teach AI what “good writing” is. It swallows up all the easy parts of good taste, so being a good writer gets harder. Take David Sedaris, who has such a particular style. Once his books get used to train AI, everyone can write more like David Sedaris. As that happens with more authors, and more writing styles, everyone can write kind of like anyone else, which makes it harder to be distinctive. Your writing loses its identity. 

I think our ideas are supposed to change our thinking. Learning changes the way you view the world, and that includes the learning that comes from the process of writing. If you just assign an essay prompt to ChatGPT, you won’t learn anything. Using AI seems the opposite of high seriousness to me.

To give myself the most choice, I’m joining the rat race of high school strivers, even though it feels like the capitalist life I don’t want.

So Berkeley went to the bottom of my list. Now, when I go on tours, I ask about AI policies. I frame it as if I want to use AI, because I noticed that tour guides often say what they think you want to hear. The Wesleyan tour guide, a student, said to me, “some teachers stick their heads in the sand and won’t use AI.” That put Wesleyan lower on my list. 

My mom favoring schools attended by good people she knows led me to tour those schools. On a day off from school my mom drove my friend Emily and me to Pennsylvania to see Haverford and Swarthmore. Both campuses were arboretums and have thousands of rare, beautiful trees.

Emily and I fell in love with Haverford. The admissions officer explained that rather than trying to just accept qualified students, they try to build a community. Our tour guide said that the campus has a culture of participation, where students engage with clubs, activities, and classes not just to pursue their own interests but to support others around them and to learn new things. They also have a debate club that’s in APDA, the league I want to join in college. 

I had toured a few schools already at this point, and had noticed that admissions info sessions repeat eerily similar jokes about bored younger siblings. But this tour felt more genuine, more about community and the things that really make the school different. I was so happy with Haverford that there were tears in my eyes on the drive to Swarthmore. 

We didn’t have time for two tours, so at Swarthmore we walked around campus and checked out the campus newspapers and art gallery. We sat in the shady tree-filled amphitheater and basked in the quiet. I loved both schools, and plan to apply to both.

Great Books

I found a book called Colleges that Change Lives by Loren Pope on a stoop in Brooklyn, and in there discovered St. Johns College, which has a campus in Santa Fe. It has a great books program, meaning the entire school follows the same curriculum. They also have an outdoors program where students hike, ski, snowboard, camp, and go on road trips. 

When I finally toured it this year, I loved it even more. They sent me an 86-page PDF of On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (in English) to read before the tour. I learned that everyone reads Ancient Greek texts in their original form, so freshmen learn enough Greek to translate the books in the curriculum. For math, they study Euclid. Students do most of the translation work on their own, and then argue about the translation of specific words and phrases in class. So at the end of the year, every student is using a translation that they consider the best, because they personally defend every word of it.

The four years of study culminate in post-Enlightenment theory (mostly in French, which everyone studies their last two years) and Einstein for science. Our tour guide told us that St. Johns is the only school where most of the science you learn is incorrect or outdated: The curriculum is designed to build your understanding of the history of thought and learning.

The tour included dinner with a student, sitting in on a seminar and language or math class, a one-on-one tour, and a 15-minute chat with an admissions officer. The student I had dinner with had just participated in a three-week tech cleanse, and was reading Machiavelli before her after-dinner seminar. She introduced me to some of her friends, and we discussed Karl Marx and debate. She told me that a lot of students left St. John’s early, because the curriculum was so intensely focused on philosophy, but this meant that the students who remained had a strong commitment to the program. I’ve known I want to major in philosophy since the 9th grade. 

I attended a freshman seminar where they engaged in an hours-long roundtable discussion of Lucretius and “the swerve,” an idea which Lucretius uses to explain the movement of atoms and the origin of free will. They all called each other by their last names, because it put everyone on the same intellectual level. At the end of the discussion, one student proclaimed “We’ve discovered the secret to the universe.” I agreed. 

I also learned that St. John’s owns two mountains nearby, and students can hike them at any time. It checked all the boxes. I loved it. 

What Is College For? 

There were many other schools I discovered that fit my criteria, or that I loved so much it didn’t matter what they were lacking. My cousin is a freshman at Williams, and when I explained “high seriousness” to him, he told me I would love Williams. He said that no one there uses AI, they love the outdoors, and that students have the option to take two student tutorials with professors. I toured and fell in love with the snowy mountains and campus. 

Although I toured a few Ivys, the only one I decided to apply to was Brown (along with every other person at my high school). Its urban campus, strong academics, and proximity to the art world of the Rhode Island School of Design, along with the atmosphere of Providence, captured my heart. I want someplace with motivated but also creative students, and Brown has that. Plus, the 5-year master’s degree program is fantastic for someone like me, who wants to continue in higher education. It jumped to near the top of my list.

Another favorite is Colorado College, with their campus near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Besides the geography, I love their block program, where you immerse yourself in one class for three and a half weeks at a time.

I know that I may not get into all these places and even if I do, I may not be able to pay for them. But to give myself the most choice, I’m joining the rat race of high school strivers, even though it feels like the capitalist life I don’t want. I studied for a year for the SATs and took them five times. I don’t have a single free afternoon after school. 

Although I like a lot of my extracurriculars and studying, most of it feels like jumping through hoops to prove I can. I knew I could get a good score on the SAT if I studied, and then I studied, and then I did. I learned nothing valuable beyond the SAT while studying for it. Nearly every teenager I know spends every waking hour jumping through these hoops. It often feels like there’s no good reason why I have to jump them to get access to high seriousness. But I do.

Most people I know consider college a stepping stone to getting a job or establishing a career. But while I want to end up financially independent, I want to go to college to learn for learning’s sake. My goal is to get my PhD in philosophy and teach, and along the way, I hope to be a firewatcher or a ranger in a national park. The way the economy and unemployment rates are looking right now, especially with the rising threat of AI, nothing is guaranteed, so why not do what I want?