Editor’s Note: The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Her Campus Kenyon as a whole.
Like most soon-to-be college freshmen, I spent my summer worrying about every detail that could go into my college experience. Unlike most college freshmen, I channeled this anxiety and stress into creating a spreadsheet of my ideal first-semester schedule. I spent hours pouring over the searchable schedule, cross-referencing professors with Rate My Professor, even looking at the lists of textbooks of classes I was interested in. I narrowed my list down to a solid eight courses I would be happy taking, but there was one class in particular that I knew I had to take: Quest for Justice, a year-long political science course for freshmen.
I heard so much about this class before actually enrolling at Kenyon. When I did my overnight visit, my host and her friends raved about how enlightening the class was and the impact their various professors were having on their college careers. It’s Kenyon’s most famous and longest-running course and is billed as something of a first-year seminar, designed to assimilate freshmen into collegiate-level class discussions and writings. Both soothed by the idea of a guided introduction to scary college classes and intrigued by the College’s description of the course as “epitomiz[ing] Kenyon,” I was sucked in right away. I came to Orientation knowing that if I didn’t get any of my other classes in registration, I needed to get Quest.
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I was so caught up in the idea of taking Quest that I was shocked when, during our first meeting, my advisor cautioned me against taking the class. There were other similar classes I could take later, she promised, and she thought I would be better positioned for future coursework by taking a psychology class this semester. I agreed, but there was still a nagging piece of me that thought, But Quest! I heard sophomores talking fondly about their classes the year before and some part of me felt I would be missing out on some vital Kenyon experience if I didn’t take it. So, I did.
Taking the class hasn’t been the worst decision of my freshman year, but it might be close.
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There is already a very interesting article on the problems associated with fetishizing Quest for Justice, although the author of that article delves more deeply into the conservative bias that may be injected into the course and the political science department as a whole. While that article presents an entirely different host of problems that are just as valid, I realized that I just didn’t click with the material or the professor. Rather than being transfixed by Locke or feeling my perspectives broaden in class, I am just as bored reading Aristotle in college as I was in high school. While very intelligent and interesting, my professor isn’t some infallible being. All in all, it’s just not what I expected.
These complaints are obviously of my own design, and I should have known that Quest was not going to be a mind-altering, college-changing experience. It’s simply one class, after all. But in the pre-college season of worrying and stressing and buying way too many pillows from Ikea because obviously I will need them all, I was hungry for advice, especially advice specific to Kenyon, and willing to listen to anything. I latched on to anything thrown my way and believed things like they were the gospel truth. Quest was just my awakening to the hard fact that not everything I’ve heard about college is going to be true.
Maybe I’ll end up learning to truly appreciate and enjoy Quest for Justice, maybe I won’t. Maybe these four years will be the best of my life, maybe they won’t. Maybe I really will end up needing to use the hefty, comprehensive first-aid kit my mom bought me, hopefully I won’t. Any of those possibilities is perfectly okay.
My Kenyon is different from the Kenyon experienced by you or by any other student. What is true of my college experience ultimately comes from my Kenyon, and my Kenyon alone; my Kenyon doesn’t need specific courses, professors, or experiences to be just as valid as someone else’s Kenyon. Maybe that’s what I’ll end up taking away from Quest for Justice this year.
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Image Credit: Kenyon.edu, Hannah Bryan