In college, there were a handful of well-into-adulthood students in my chemical engineering classes. They stood out like sore thumbs, being a decade or more years older than the rest of us fresh out of high school kids. But as our classes progressed through the curriculum, and class sizes became smaller and smaller as people dropped out of ChemE to presumably change course for their major, these adult students remained. To me, they stood out for their intentionality in being there.
They were never late to class. They sat in the front rows. They asked questions. They waited after class to speak to the professors (which I would NEVER do). They did their homework. They didn’t care about who were the cool kids or whether anyone was paying them attention. When we had to work in groups, they showed up ready to buckle down and gave more than their fair share. And they did all of this with a scarlet letter of sorts plastered to their chests, alerting everyone that they, for whatever reason, didn’t do this as young adults and would never fully ‘fit in’ with their fellow future graduates.
Two stand out in my memory. One was a mustached man I think in his late 30s or early 40s and, goodness, he wanted it. Earnestness and perseverance radiated off of him. He’d been an operator somewhere and had decided to go back to be the engineer. He was just so nice, and humble. I admired him then, but even more so now. The other was a middle aged mom. I was assigned to be in a group with her for various projects on multiple occasions and got to know her a little better. She’d experienced a head injury as a young adult and was not shy about telling you all about it. I always wondered how on earth she’d ended up choosing chemical engineering of all the choices. Perhaps due to the head injury, she didn’t have the natural intellect needed to get through those ChemE courses. She struggled academically. But I don’t know that I saw someone in my four years at NC State who worked harder. She worked so very hard. She put all of her effort into every assignment. She just never quit. All while being an adult-adult with young children. I have thought of her off and on through the years and wondered whatever happened to her after college.
These adult students weren’t there for the “experience” of college like more than half of our ChemE colleagues. They were there to get the formal education needed to grant them the key to success in the outside world. They weren’t there to party. They were there to learn and to learn only. I felt much more kinship with them than most of my peers. It felt glaringly obvious which kids were there because of scholarships both scraped by and hard earned, or were working minimum wage jobs to earn living expenses on top of the academic rigor we were put through, and which kids were there because mommy and daddy were paying for them to do the next thing, just like they’d always known.
The adult students didn’t take it for granted. The adult students valued every moment of face time in the classroom. The adult students didn't squander the opportunity to learn how to think like a chemical engineer, because more than likely, THEY were paying for it. It is human nature to place a different value on something you’ve had to purchase for yourself than something you were given or simply expected to have. I’m hardly the first person to observe this in a college classroom. This is a generally understood phenomenon for college and in life. The kid (or adult) in college on their own buck has a different appreciation for being there than the spoiled kid whose mommy still picks up their laundry and Fridays and returns it on Saturdays and brings snacks and dinner to student study groups.
But I wonder how often we unknowingly play the role of the spoiled rich kid in our own adult lives?
We may have a hard time identifying with the party-crowd kids sitting in the back of the college classroomitorium, but are we approaching our lives and those who surround us in it with that same expectational, self-serving mentality?
In what ways do we take the people and things around us for granted, because perhaps that’s all we know? We’ve spent so long in it that we can no longer objectively view ourselves.
Does the person who has always had a reliable car feel the same gratitude as the person who had to manage life for years without a vehicle they could trust to get them where they needed to go?
Does the person who had children as soon as they desired feel the same gratitude for their ability to have children as the person who struggled with infertility for years?
Does the person who got married at 21 feel the same gratitude for the companionship and iron-sharpening-iron of marriage that someone who had to wait for it until 40 feels?
Does the person who lives in a quiet, peaceful neighborhood feel the same gratitude for their home as the person who just bought a house in the country after enduring night after night with the sounds of the interstate in their backyard and sirens screaming daily down their street?
Does the person who fills their car up with gas every time they stop at the pump feel the same gratitude as the person who spent years creatively planning and restricting their trips around only being able to put $5 or $10 in a time?
We could list an army of these scenarios. These things aren’t givens. But how often do we gloss over their significance because we have come to expect them? It’s entirely possible that someone does feel the weight of gratitude for all of the examples that popped into my mind. But it’s also entirely possible that we’ve mistakenly placed those things in the Expected Bucket of life.
We can so easily identify with the adult students in college, thinking we are the hard workers showing up in our lives. But if we took a step back and really looked, how much more often are we playing the role of the kid expecting life to be smoothed ahead of us? How often are we the college kids complaining about having to do a challenging assignment, rather than seeing it as preparing us to be successful in what is in the days to come? How often are we resentful when our path isn’t smooth? And who ends up on the receiving end of that contempt?