Co-education and the Cutting Edge

By: Jason Murphy

Whether you’re aiming to enter graduate school or to enter the job market after your 4 years at A&M, it takes quite the broker in risk to do it successfully. Both can feel surprisingly fickle, especially for the recent college graduate. And then there’s the disappointment. We’ve all met the phrase “we appreciate your interest, but we regret to inform you…” and, not doing much to console, we can’t help but think “save the baloney for lunch, guys.” But surely these aren’t the words you were expecting to hear after working so terribly hard towards graduation: those poorly taken from your old college rejection letters. So how can they be prevented, you probably ask? Well, lucky for you there still is time. But you can’t just do anything: you’ll need to do the unexpected and potently insightful in order to unsheathe that cutting edge inside you. And an independent research project or internship, many feel, epitomizes just this.

Now if we could, for just a moment, take for granted the reward and distinction you’ll receive for writing something like this on your resume, then it’s possible to examine some of the more personal fruit it bears. And while we’re at it, let’s focus in a little more on doing something like an independent research project. Sadly, because only a handful of graduating students every year leave having done something like this, the benefits are little known (if not only to them).

Sadly, pedagogy is a very rare quality; but it means much more for the beholder than just the ability to like really dead historical figures and to feign laughter at Shakespearean humor. It means that you possess the ability to take something otherwise dry and objective and breathe life into it; make it interesting. In many ways, it’s like being able to irrigate a desert. And, big surprise, this is insanely marketable; who wouldn’t want a quality like that in a potential employee/grad student; who knows what kind of insight you’re capable of. Also, you can cut out what doesn’t interest you or what would otherwise weigh you down on yet another class syllabus; you get to become the teacher in deciding what to learn.

Every major has some form of “directed studies” or “research” class that you could earn elective credit for taking. And many students will admit that there is at least 1 subject matter they would find interesting enough to return to. The catch is really quite simple: all you need do is ask. Professors are also active researchers, in addition to teachers, so of course they’ll be sympathetic towards your sentiments. Something like this should really be seriously considered. The benefits are too large in number to not ignore. You’ll get a killer recommendation; you’ll write a killer essay; your resume will look…killer.

But at the bottom line, there are too many benefits for one to ignore. Taking control of your studies and making your major your own simply makes sense.