As I walk to class each day, I always have to budget an extra five minutes into every trip in order to account for those random encounters with friends, classmates, and acquaintances that happen all too often. Having been in a very public position for the past two years, many of those acquaintances are simply that-acquaintances. I didn’t mind it; it made me feel like I had many more than 365 friends as the Facebook tells me I have.
Just as often is the experience of walking to class and seeing someone that you’ve never seen before, hanging out with others that are completely unfamiliar. I went to a high school with 140 fellow students in the high school and 36 in my graduating class, so this was one of the aspects of Washington University that I found very appealing-on your way to class you would encounter both old friends and fresh faces. On the surface this sounds like an attractive idea, but when you really think about it, it’s slightly overwhelming. There are people who will forever represent themselves as Washington University graduates, much as I will, yet I have no conception of what experiences they have had which qualify us to be lumped together in such a way. Their lives and experiences are completely foreign.
We, the graduating seniors, have just spent four years learning about ourselves, experiencing things that we never would have expected. We all think we know what the “Wash. U. experience” is, and my bet is that most would be willing to go on the record explaining their interpretation. When it comes down to it, however, we only know a tiny sliver of what it means to have gone to school here. Our perspective is shaped by those random occurrences that happen everyday without our knowledge and forever change the way we look at life.
To borrow a line from everyone’s favorite politician, Donald Rumsfeld: “.there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” ‘Unknown unknowns’ are a concept that is never really discussed in education; we’re told to conduct research, state our assumptions, and above all else be well-versed in a subject. There is hardly ever time dedicated to exploring for exploring’s sake, trying to figure out what we don’t know.
How would one even go about this seemingly impossible task? Taking it back a step, why should one even care about these ‘unknown unknowns’? Without making the conscious decision to take the different route to class, sit in a different place in class, or even attend that random lecturer that we all see posters for, would there ever be a chance to learn what is unknown? Even looking out the other window while driving is an attempt at this style of unguided learning.
Complacency breeds failure, and if we for one second start to think that we know what we know and don’t know then our learning will cease, and stagnation will set in. The world is ever-changing, meaning that in order to be successful, however you define that, one must always be trying to figure out what they do not know in the spirit of learning. What is found may not be what was originally targeted, but that’s the great thing – learning anything can be considered a success. Forgetting things is much more difficult than noticing them, meaning that that bit of knowledge will rest in your head for longer than you would expect.
So what does this have to do with Commencement? Perhaps nothing at all and I have simply been rambling; on the contrary, perhaps it means that we must realize that there are people, places, and things to experience out there that we cannot even fathom, and yet they all somehow can have an impact on how we live our lives, and that by discovering them we can begin to understand more fully what we do in fact know and don’t know and how it impacts our way of thinking.
It wouldn’t be a Student Life article without a clich‚ pop-culture reference, so here it is straight from MTV’s True Life series: “You think you know, but you have no idea.” We have been extremely fortunate to receive the education that we have, but on this day of celebration of our accomplishments and achievements, we must realize that we, like the viewers of the MTV series, ultimately have no idea – we’ve only scratched the surface. What else is out there? That will forever be an unknown unknown.