Juan Garcia

I was born in Mexico; Spanish is my first language. A small town in a somewhat remote place in Jalisco Mexico witnessed both my birth and upbringing until age seventeen. One of the primordial characteristics of that town was – and it probably still is – its detachment from the busy, noisy and unending strive for progress and innovation which lies at the very root of what we may call ‘the modern way of life’. Life was different there: it was simple. Tranquility and the appreciation for the serenity of a random moment were the norm; a profound respect for others and a relentless effort to guard the well-being of the community as a whole were always at play. Also, the culture that I identified as my own was such that education was peripheral, to say the least, to the central preoccupations of the quotidian life. My entire extended family, as well as virtually everybody I was acquainted with at that time, dropped out of school after the elementary years. A male was considered “old enough” to work after completion of the sixth grade. It was simply the norm to abandon any academic pursuit after “graduation” from elementary school and to join the agricultural labor force; and so I did. My family never advised me otherwise. Why would they? Life was straightforward; the objective of any good couple of parents was to inculcate upon their children the qualities that were required for community harmony and for survival – which in an agricultural community included the art of harvesting the fields. My parents are wonderful – I love them very much – they knew that my male gender was designed in such a way that it dictated the ideal role that I was inexorably and persistently going to strive for: an honest, God-fearing, hard-working leader of a loving family. That is what it meant to be un buen hombre. Five years of my life – after leaving school – were employed working towards that ideal. I comprehended my surroundings and could smoothly navigate through them; my life ideal was clear and appealing, just as much as the means to achieve it were; life was simple, direct, harmonious, comprehensible and attainable: it was good.

Everything changed. At the age of seventeen I found myself in an alien world: the US. Once here I became exposed to, and overwhelmed with, a new mentality: a mentality fond of an entrepreneurship attitude, hospitable to an insatiable desire for advancement, and enamored with higher education. This novel way of confronting life made me feel unfit, foreign, with many of what I regarded as my most valuable qualities seen as irrelevant and sometimes even obsolete – apt only for a pre-industrialization era, an era long forgotten. This new situation made me feel ignorant. Such undesirable sentiment obliged me to retake my long forgotten academic career – almost eight years had passed since my renunciation of scholarship. With no more than an elementary education and a very limited English vocabulary, I started taking GED classes after my ten-hour-shift at a construction company. I attended classes four times a week for about an hour and a half with the most attentive and supportive teacher I’ve ever had: Leslie Henderson. She was lovely; my academic career is in great debt to her. About six months afterwards I had a GED diploma in my possession.

With this new acquisition, my first forward step towards academia was taken. The age of twenty inaugurated a particularly fascinating phase of my life: college. I vividly remember my first day; it was an exciting adventure, a voyage towards the land of knowledge, a knowledge that extended beyond the production of the bare necessities for the sustaining of human life, a knowledge that promised to be truly enchanting. There it was, my first day in college, my first class period of my first class: math. Everything was new to me; the words ‘integer’ ‘function’ ‘polynomial’ ‘parabola’ ‘logarithm’ and the rest were literally words in a different language for me. I needed to learn both the mathematical concepts and the words that denoted them, but I didn’t care. It was a new adventure, and I was excited and willing to confront that new and strange mentality with all its complexities. Thus I chose a desk out of the available ones, sat down, and awaited for the commencement of my journey.

It truly was quite an adventure; as time passed, amid atoms’ electron configurations, the general theory of relativity, Homer’s Iliad, Freud’s psychoanalysis, antiderivatives of indefinite integrals, and contemporary utilitarianism a new passion arouse in me: that of learning. This nascent byproduct of my academic training was eventually to flourish and occupy a notorious position of central significance in my mentality.

As my college experience unfolded, the underlying structure of this new mentality became more evident. It was characterized by a flexibility that evolved to cope with the capricious fluctuations of supply and demand; this mentality adopted the capitalistic ideal of creativeness and competitiveness as personally binding, to the extent of providing a life ideal marked by an overabundant and ever-growing bank account, by prestige, and very importantly by individual prestige, and by a sense of self-worth that is to be extracted from, and demarked by, professional success. Central to this mentality is economic efficiency; a type of efficiency that is to be attained by the independent, rational and self-interested decisions of individuals whose sole motivation is that of profit maximization. This way of conducting one’s life far from being negatively portrayed is in verity the very motor ensuring the sustainability of economic growth; all of which is predicted and supported by the ‘Invisible Hand’ theory – a theory bolstered by the plausibility and popularity of the economic model – and advertised in a politically correct façade. Under this mentality, college is prevalently regarded as an investment, an investment of time, money and laborious work, whose return is facilitating the acquisition of a promising job, a job which brings within palpable distance the possibility of the so desired professional success. A very important component of this comprehensive and coherent mentality is the notion of acceptable motivations for decision making. This mentality validates personal desires and wants, and elevates them to the status of justificatory motives for action. Also, this individualistic mentality embraces the possibility of a particular person defying the opinion of the majority and being nonetheless right in so doing. The concept of right conduct is not constrained by a conformation to popular opinion; rather it has its own independent character.

After I became sufficiently submerged into this mentality and appropriated some of its principal tenets as my own, for the first time in my life an adequate rationale licensing my actions solely revolved around my personal goals, choices, aspirations, and ideals. Indeed, this new mentality allowed me to overlook the popular investment-conception of college and say, and very importantly also justified me in saying, “I like philosophy; therefore, I’ll do philosophy”. Thence, I chose a philosophy major based on the simple fact that it fascinated me, and arduously dedicated my time to deepen and widen my fascination throughout my academic experience.

Nowadays, almost five years after my initiation in university education, I’m about to graduate from OSU with honors in the liberal Arts, with Magna Cum Laude distinction, and with sixty eight credits more than what I need. I’ll receive my Bachelors degree this quarter (Winter 2007). Furthermore, I’ve applied to six different graduate programs in philosophy; the official date for them to decide which applicants to accept is by April 15th (I’m writing in late February), yet I have already heard from two departments – both accepted me. I got a Graduate Teaching Assistantship from OSU, with full tuition and living expenses, and a Doctoral Fellowship from Purdue University, with full tuition, living expenses, and no teaching requirements for the first two years. As of now, I’m waiting for the graduate departments from Notre Dame, Cornell, Michigan, and St. Louis to make their decision, in order for me to choose from the available alternatives for graduate school. In whatever case, the fact is, by the end of this year I’ll be working towards my PhD in philosophy.

Today I present my case definitely not as a transition from a “lower” social situation to a “higher” one. Rather, I present it as a wonderful and personally instructing experience which broadened my horizons: the transition from a particular way of understanding life – with its comprehensive structure, feasible rationale, conception of acceptable motivations and actions, ideals, goals and means to attain them – to a different way of understanding and confronting it, resulting in a richer amalgamation of the two. After this experience, a new day is just dawning, there is much territory to explore and life to experiment, and I’m grateful for my Hispanic heritage which allows me to more widely, and hence I believe to better, appreciate what is to come.