Second Years

Halfway into my third semester (of four) in this program, I'm amazed at how the politics of experience works. We are second years, and we are so much more laid back than we were last year. We feel we have conquered some challenge, we feel we have survived, and we have much of the confidence that goes with that.

At this time last year, we were scared new students to whom the second years probably seemed arrogant and disconnected. I know I thought they seemed like upperclassmen-- and I mean that with all its intrinsic envy and resentment. Who did they think they were, anyway? Well, if they were anything like we are, they were probably just happy to be finished with their first year. And also like us, they probably looked on the first years with sympathy.

It's interesting to see how much of this type of behavior relates to experience rather than age. In college, everyone's pretty much the same age, so it's easy to attribute the upperclassman syndrome to age, but in our little experiment now, I'd have to say it has more to do with experience. We've been through things (like Markstrat, like Charlie's accounting class) that the first years can't even dream about. And we've survived, realizing (maybe a little too late) that in the end we're all going to be just fine.

I see it on the faces and in the attitudes of my classmates now: we all come a little later to class, some of us are even (gasp!) missing a class or two, fewer of us are asking questions or keeping up with the reading. Call it our own version of the senior slump.

What's most interesting is that this has nothing to do with age-- some of the first years are older than some of us (just as some of us were older than the second years last year). Being a second year is more a state of mind than anything else: a little less panicky, a little wiser, a little more anxious for the whole thing to be done already, and also a little sad that it's all passing so quickly.

Such is probably the case for any challenging time in our lives. The actual experience of it all is way too complex to fully describe in words. In order to experience it, you have to sit in that chair every other weekend for a full year, vacillating between terror and insight.