Why Graduate School? (Apparently I don’t know yet…)

• Why did you choose to attend Graduate School?

• Do you think a Higher Education is necessary today or in the future?

• Now that you have stated some reasons why you are pursuing a degree at a traditional school, investigate and write about other ways to obtain this knowledge in alternative learning experiences.

I decided to attend ITP because I wanted to break some barriers, to get to know more people that are focused and creative, and to learn from this environment of diversity and collaboration. I wanted to pursue a master’s degree for a time, however my undergraduate studies in EE left me kind of bored, and then when I started to study Choreography I really liked it and learned a lot while I was there, but I didn’t like much the way the group behaved or thought towards its own education. The teaching system was also generally old and it wouldn’t let me explore within the school the ideas that it helped me to generate. I was working in my company for a while with my partner, and then we started to encounter some barriers in the dance world that had to do with us being young and from a different background than the arts or dance one. It was very difficult for us to find good collaborators. We could and we worked very well with the ones that we found, but because of time constraints or other responsibilities, it was not so easy to continue working with them besides of the specific projects.

I wanted to expand my horizons, but I knew they had nothing to do with technical knowledge. There are a lot of materials where it is possible to get information, and for me, most of the time it was better to use them than to get the information through an exposition-based class. When I found about ITP I really liked the idea of diversity, collaboration, and open-mindedness; of breaking barriers and prejudices of what can or can’t be done. 

Another impact factor to consider is that I’m here because of the [financial] support given by NYU Tisch and a pair of Mexican organizations, CONACYT and Fundación INBA. Without that, the tuition costs would be practically impossible to cover with my income as a teacher and as a freelance with my company, and many years of savings would have been needed because of the currency conversion rate between the Mexican Peso and the US Dollar. Would I save my money during many years in order to get a master’s degree? I don’t think so. But now that I have this opportunity, I want to make the most out of it.

I get overwhelmed by the question of the importance of Higher Education. It has to do with what is its purpose, and the purpose of life. Does it all revolves around money? I liked the text about the liberal arts degree, because I think that there are (should be?) higher reasons to do things. I believe in human potential, and I think that activities such as arts, sports and basic science have an important role in our humanity. Would it be better to cut all the budget of those activities to eradicate poverty and food scarcity? I’m not really sure, because what would be the purpose of saving us all if there were no more of these things to do and to get inspired from? However, do all these things actually mean something of value to all the people without higher education?

I liked the following excerpts from In Defense of Liberal Arts:

If your liberal arts degree doesn’t prove to be the golden ticket to white-collar employment, the dirty secret is that neither do many people’s degrees in business or engineering.

But as someone who went through the program with a few deep reservations—which included my leaving for a year and then coming back—there is, I think, no other place where these higher goals can be pursued so openly and so easily. And if there are two different, mutually exclusive ends to education—freedom and job-preparation—it is good that there is (or was) at least one institution in the world that made that choice so clear.

Subjects such as philosophy, classical literature, and mathematics should be studied because they are themselves goods that the student should aspire to understand and make his own. They are—to put it strongly—among the good we live life for. Like Socrates, who was poor and shabby, the student of the liberal arts may never make much of himself. But for Socrates—and for his students—that was never the goal.

Though Socrates did defend himself, it was to people who did not understand what he was saying.

About alternative learning experiences (and probably with traditional ones too), I think the most important part has to do with motivation. Why would we want to learn more? Are “money”, “productivity”, “fear of being replaced by a machine”, “the need of sustaining a family”, convincingly enough reasons? Isn’t the curiosity and willingness to learn part of what makes us human? How do we “lose” those characteristics?

The system we live in is after all created and reinforced by all of us. Entrepreneurship may allow us to change the rules by asking if we really need to replicate the known models. What are the things that we require of employees? Do we need a resume and an interview? What kind of interview? During the last couple of years I have been very moved by the notion of Google not caring about hiring top college graduates…

I apologize for the loose structure of this text: a lot of questions have been arising and I don’t know yet how to organize them or how to start answering them…