After having been to classes for a full week, I can finally take a break for a minute, and make an “assessment” of my current situation.

I am starting to realize that I came to Brandeis with high expectations and the wrong attitude. And at the end of the week I can’t help but feel somewhat disappointed – still unsure whether my disappointment is unreasonable, or reasonably justified. Perhaps I am jumping to conclusions. Perhaps, it’s not the program, but my own ambivalence and attitude towards it, perhaps I am being arrogant, ungrateful, impatient, or maybe all of the above. I do realize that I should be grateful to be here. I do realize that this is a privilege. As the program director said in his opening speech (and we all know how to take these speeches seriously), I am, after all, among the lucky few, among the elite… How many people in the world have access to primary education, let alone graduate school at such fine academic institution? How can I not be ecstatic when I am so close to that shrine that I made graduate school be?

I am, in fact, surrounded by young professionals from all over the world. I am guided by mentors who have several decades of experience not only in academic field, but in the real world. They all have been there, right at the very grassroots – in gutter and squalor, in desert and jungle. My own adviser is the founder of the program himself, who’s been all over the world, and led and directed multiple programs within the giants of the industry. My professors have held similar high ranking and respectable positions… Our inspirations are shared, our dreams are encouraged, our academic aspirations rewarded…

Day in day out classrooms heave with our joint goodwill, compassion and empathy, arguments flare with bright ideas and passion… Reading materials encompass the finest ideas from all over the world, to serve as food for further thought… This is my element, right here, in these classrooms, among the bright and accomplished and young and inspired… And yet, by the end of the day I feel as if I have been let down, disappointed, lost…

I did, after all, come here with highest expectation to find not only shared compassion and good will, but in search of excellence, highest academic excellence that takes nothing for granted, tolerates no givens, when even the most obvious, apparent, almost axiomatic notions are questioned, challenged, dissected. Excellence that can no longer afford naiveté, excellence that looks beyond the accepted, traditional and takes the uniform thoughts to a completely new level of seeing, reasoning, understanding…

So far I am yet to come across such excellence.
For now, I have to wonder whether my expectations were, in fact, unreasonably high. Perhaps I did turn the idea of graduate school into a shrine of some kind, an almost impossible shrine that only very few can reach… Perhaps, what I am looking for is not to be found here, in this fine academic institution or anywhere else, for that matter.

Yet, what I am feeling now is not just disappointment. What I am experiencing is Holden Caulfield syndrome of some sorts. Despite my excitement, my blatant admiration of the new faces that I got to meet in such a short period time and my initial inspiration with such high reaching and noble ideas, what i see and hear is something old, familiar, too subtle and elusive for me to be able to explain, yet tangible enough to be felt with my backbone – the fake… false, carefully guised undertones that creep in every time professor pauses to cough, every time a question is left hanging in the air in the pursuit of the next. The game of pretense. The old, familiar game of pretense… None of this is serious, none of this matters, coined phrases thrown back and forth, clichés, technical words that have become so common that they have lost their meaning, recycled, repetitive ideas that are being served to us on a pretty plate like an exotic and fabulous dish…

It’s going to be a long year…

I already want it to be over. Hence the bad attitude.

And yet, I need to remind myself, before I move on to my next assigned reading, that it’s not just the Master’s degree that I’m here for. Although the last thing I want to do during the next year or so is to question and challenge everything that’s served on my plate, I do need to exercise a certain sense of reality and healthy dose of cynicism to get through this…

More on this later…
Back to the dissecting table – my daily readings, that is.