Ryan Benjamin | Learning for learning's sake?

The time has come when I've begun to think about my post-collegiate future. I'm not talking about a career. Instead, I'm wondering about what to do with all the extra knowledge we've acquired over the last four years. In my case at least, as an Urban Studies major, I'm writing a thesis because I have to.

My thesis focuses on how students at an urban high school perceive the factors that influence their motivation. It's interesting stuff, and I'm applying a lot of what I've learned throughout college. But because the idea of writing a thesis has been ingrained in my mind for so long, I never thought to ask why - until recently.

For the Urban Studies annual public lecture, our speaker was Peter Dreier, a professor of political science at Occidental College. At a luncheon with all the seniors, after we each introduced our thesis topic, he asked us, "Well, what are you going to DO with it? What are the broader implications of your research? Who's it going to help?"

I'd never really thought about that. In order to recruit research participants, I made something up about how it would help teachers in the long run. But Dreier made me think that our papers could be put to the greater good instead of sitting on a shelf for 30 years.

The sheer thought that my thesis will appear in Newsweek, let alone some academic journal, is a little far-fetched. Elaine Simon, co-director of the Urban Studies Program, explains that academic research is a much more complicated process.

"There is the role of the external researcher who is more of a theoretician, and the role of the internal researcher who wants to increase the immediate usefulness of the research, thereby empowering the users," she said. "It depends where you want to position yourself on the continuum."

In a perfect world, the thesis would have broader implications after graduation. If it doesn't, then why go to college? My cousin Rebecca Zeldin, a graduate of Haverford College - a much smaller liberal-arts school outside the city - found it much more challenging to have an "unwavering declaration" and "artificial opinion" while writing her thesis than what she really wanted: processing text and organizing her ideas according to her own way of thinking.

But that doesn't always work out. Though I love doing bizarre things like memorizing digits of pi, I still have trouble with writing a 50-page paper for little reason other than to sharpen my research skills. Maybe I think this because I go to Penn, where everything we do has to lead to some larger purpose.

At a recent "Food 4 Thought" dinner, SAS Dean Rebecca Bushnell spoke about the role of pre-professionalism at Penn. It's true that Penn students often focus too much on what comes after college rather than learning for the sake of learning, but at the same time, there's a healthy tension between what we want to study and its purpose in the real world, she explained. Bushnell attended Swarthmore, another smaller liberal-arts college outside the city. "No one ever asked me why I was studying a particular discipline," she said. "Here, we are more outer-directed."

I've found that many high schoolers I'm researching don't value homework and studying because they see themselves getting a diploma by doing the bare minimum. In our high schools, we probably valued hard work because we knew we needed it to get into Penn. (Hey, I just used my thesis research for this column!) But transferring that rationale to college is more complex.

In addition to the pre-professional schools, many students take courses in nearly all 12 graduate schools, the College is heading toward a business minor, and we've developed ABCS courses to civically engage with our city. Certainly we put a premium on the University helping us to become doers. The question is: Do we lose some of the organic nature of learning in the process? I'm not sure there's an answer. But I hope that in a few years I'll look back and see that in some way, it all mattered.

Ryan Benjamin is a College senior from New Haven, Conn., and secretary of SCUE. His email is benjamin@dailypennsylvanian.com. A Connecticut Yankee appears on alternating Mondays.

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