Originally, this was an article about why picking courses at Amherst is a very different procedure than at most colleges. It sounded a lot like an excerpt from a speech given by an admissions officer, probably immediately preceding a record-low number of applicants. But some of the things I discussed have really stuck with me. I put a lot of thought into classroom atmosphere — the dynamic between students who already know each other and their professor — and into intellectual exploration — the act of venturing beyond the realm of known interests.
The transfer deadline for many elite colleges and universities is coming up. The last thing I want to do is to try to convince everyone that Amherst is the only place in the world worth getting an undergraduate education at. For many students, in fact, I think transferring might be something to look into (as my advisor tells me repeatedly, to my great discomfort). What I do want to do is implore anyone considering transferring to look carefully at their reasons for doing so.
At this point, I think it’s necessary to acknowledge an elephant in the Amherst room. I’ll try to do it with a minimum of awkwardness. For some Amherst students, the College was not their first choice. For many, many others, it was. For any student in the latter group thinking about transferring, it’s clear that something about Amherst is not what you expected. If you can figure out exactly why that is and think you can change it for the better at another school, then I hope things work out for you the second time around.
The students in the former group are the ones I’ve been thinking about the most. You may consider your presence at Amherst a mistake. And in the sense that you did not intend to be here, this may be a valid consideration. But for whatever reason you ended up at Amherst, you’re here. Even accidental circumstances are ones that shape you — to ignore them is to shut the door on the world and your place in it.
Please note: I am not saying that people who transfer out of Amherst are closed-minded. I’m saying that if you’ve lived in a shell from the time you got a rejection letter from your school of choice to the time you could apply for transfer, then you’ve done a closed-minded thing. On the other hand, you may have been the most exploratory, pensive, open-minded person on campus for the last six months and still want to transfer. The transferring part of the equation is not the necessarily dangerous one. It’s the reasons you may have for transferring that are worrying.
You may be asking now, “Who is this intelligent, probably very handsome writer and where can I find him?” But more realistically, “Why the hell is the title of this article ‘The End of Add/Drop’?” For safety reasons, I’ll keep my personal information to myself. I chose the title of this article because I think a lot of the Amherst experience comes out in the first two weeks of the semester. Not, to make a subtle but pivotal distinction, because I think the first two weeks of the semester make up a lot of the Amherst experience. In these first two weeks, we’ve been reminded of our ambition, our innate impetus to explore and our deliberateness. We have a will to learn, not an obligation. But this article isn’t supposed to be a mission statement or a guide of any kind. You’ve got to find out what this experience is about for yourself.
If nothing has awakened you to that experience yet this winter, to the explanation of why everyone at Amherst is indeed here, then be sure to find something that does. Read something, listen to something, think about something, do something that has the Amherst experience in it. If you can honestly still say with certainty that your reasons for wanting to transfer now are different from the reasons you had in high school because you are taking into account the experience you’ve gone through in between, I wish you the best of luck. If you leave this place not having known the spirit of it, then you leave it without having grown. Don’t do Amherst College or yourself the tragic injustice of allowing that to happen.