Graduation

So, I graduated from BYU. As I'm sure it is for most college grads, the whole experience was rather anti-climatic. It's hard to feel like you've really accomplished something when your sitting in a large room full of people who have done the exact same thing as you.

I am proud of what I accomplished at BYU, however. I didn't earn any major awards or anything, but I did fairly well in a difficult major while spending a fair amount of time working or staying at home with kids while Cait worked. But most of all, I am proud of how much I've felt I've learned while at BYU. While it took me a while to learn how to get good grades, I came into BYU well prepared to learn in a non-GPA oriented fashion. If I had to choose between knowledge gathering skills and GPA gathering skills (which is not a necessary choice for a lot of people and probably wouldn't have been for me if I'd put more effort in high school), I'm glad I had the former.

I recognize, of course, that there is still an immeasurable amount of knowledge to obtain in my life, but I feel that my undergrad experience has taught me how to learn how to learn, and not just learn, but to apply that learning to life and share it in meaningful ways.

So there you have it, there is my endorsement of my experience as an undergrad at BYU. I loved the high level of spirituality at the university and that my "secular" education could mix well with my "spiritual" education. I was also constantly surprised at the high level of discourse and the openness to new and different ideas of most teachers and students (although, especially among the students there were some really closed-minded individuals). Of course, being a private, religious university, there was a lot of bias toward accepted LDS ideas, but at least that bias was almost always openly admitted to and discussed, where I feel that in other circumstances, teachers and students try to conceal a bias that everyone has, whether they admit it or not. This openess about the perspective that we all brought to "truth" really allowed for a lot of personal exploration into what my own perspective on truth was.

I came out of BYU a much more liberal and less doctrinally-oriented Mormon, but I still came out a Mormon. I don't know what would have happened if I'd gone to a university that was more generally liberal. Would I have become even more liberal, or would I have reacted against it (as I reacted the against conservatism at BYU, although I'm not sure to what extent that is true) and become more conservative. I guess we'll find out in Madison.