Fun does not discount from being responsible

Photo courtesy of Blake Israel

Life at Tech complements itself to a fairly boring existence. You can get away with going to class and back, locking yourself away and only focusing on the work you have in front of you.

Alternatively, you can choose to do minimal work now and rather focus on ‘professional development’ which is all the same way to ask: how do you best present yourself to employers? Though scenario one feels like a sad existence, I am more worried about those in scenario two. 

I have seen several peers get caught up milking every single experience or activity for a resume boost or a project to add to their portfolio. But by fixing your gaze on the future you miss out on actually experiencing all the amazing experiences, activities or events attended.

Are you joining a club to solely add it to your resume? Are you attending a party to network? Are you contributing to a class project just to add it to your portfolio? Are you trudging through homework to get it completed?

Do you feel that you get the most out of the experience at hand by doing the following? And more importantly are you satisfied with it? If you had the opportunity to have an infinite amount of time in a day would you treat the following in the same manner?

Before I answer, I understand it is hard to look beyond being productive. I’ve personally also gotten caught up in the “grind” choosing to finish tasks rather than savoring them. A good example of that is writing for the Technique, at a point it became a job… and what’s the fun in that?

That is what all questions boil down for me “How can I maximize my fun?”

I am not saying to only do what is fun but instead see how fun can be injected into every part of your life because why else are we here if not to have fun? It is hard to articulate this change in mindset, and I understand that this is not an answer to everything. However, I hope to bring to attention that being a responsible adult does not mean you need to have a boring existence. 

Many of you may jump to disagree mentioning that you make time for fun. I counter, what is the distribution of work to fun and why can’t we have fun working?

Let’s go back to scenario one. Everyone has those days, where they just need to get through work. But with a change in mindset, this could be an enjoyable time. I look out for challenging questions in problem sets; getting excited to work on what I would call a fun problem knowing that I will come out of it understanding the topics relating to the problem at a deeper level. 

An alternate approach is getting hyped about straightforward questions since you saw similar work in class and you would be able to whiz through it.

No disrespect to Tech or a student doing the following, however, I would be so bored if I were to just go to class and back and only focus on schoolwork. I tried it out during the last half of my senior year, during school closing, and the lifestyle was not for me.

This is where we start to enter scenario two, where we start to do more work past what’s expected.

Most students look at all these experiences, like clubs and on-campus jobs, as supplementary to the university lifestyle which is an amazing start. 

This thinking sometimes gets poisoned when you get caught up in worrying about the future. I stray from the following by constantly reminding myself why I initially jumped on the opportunity in the first place… what was my selfish reason? Most of the time, my reason is just wanting to experience something new. I try to jump on any experience that passes my way or looks remotely interesting to me. A friend I met in freshman year used to joke about the motto “try everything once” and to an extent, I agree with him. 

By jumping on every opportunity, I have had the pleasure to be exposed to several amazing people, places and events. 

Moreover by focusing on having fun, I have been able to maximize personal and professional development without actively trying.

At the beginning of this semester, I had the opportunity to go to the American Chemical Society Fall 2022 National Meeting in Chicago. I was one out of a few hundred undergraduate presenters at the event. 

Most of them had come for one day to present and head out right after, I understand several were limited by project funding. However, a majority were just focused on their presentation and nothing more. 

We were at the ACS Fall meeting. There were over 12,000 people registered ranging from undergrads to retired faculty to industry and government professionals. There were almost 10,000 presentations across five days. I felt extremely lucky to stay the whole time where I was able to seek out lectures on topics that interested me, actively meet new people regardless of the benefit they could provide to me, and present my own work to experts and proceed to pick their brains. 

Through all this, I found a happy medium between scenario one and two. I didn’t just present my work and leave, and I wasn’t actively looking at how I could exploit this conference to push my future. 

Rather, I enjoyed the present for what it was, which not only helped me make the most of my presentation but also by chance, helped my future too by meeting several senior scientists in the industry as well as professors with who I may be interested in working with during my PhD.

When I look back at the event, established faces in the community did treat this event as a big get-together — they were just as excited as I was. 

A similar ethos is seen in the corporate world too, the higher up the ladder you go the more you see people act like people who actively search for how to infuse fun into work even though it can be argued that they have more responsibilities. 

So, I would like to ask, why is there a stigma around having fun? Why must we not have fun to be “responsible”? 

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