I came to St. John's four years after I dropped out of state university, having all but given up on higher education. None of the particular majors I chose--and I flitted between majors more than a bee between flowers--seemed to address my questions in the right way. All the fields of study seemed too regimented and divided. None seemed to be more than mere career preparation, which is enough, I suppose, for those who hold their education to no higher standards. I didn't even know then that I wanted to pursue writing; I was flitting among mathematical and scientific disciplines. At St. John's, I found a community of people with interests as diverse as their backgrounds. Even those with budding notions, like mine, of becoming writers in some capacity could not be compartmentalized. I found academic writers, poets, journalists, and fiction writers. All of these people had chosen to trade formal training in the craft of writing for a larger world view, yet they still wanted to develop their writing skills somehow within this larger context.

We all have found that reading the Great Books and studying the details and mechanisms of language fosters in us an unparalleled understanding of the subtleties and complexities of the written word. Academic papers, as plentiful as they are, offer repeated opportunities to develop our voices and our abilities to raise and resolve questions, and to learn how to dissect a text as we never have before, regardless of subject matter. I have had opportunities to maintain my interest in mathematics--writing at length about Euclid's Elements, Kurt Godel's undecidability theorem, Minkowski's concept of spacetime, Georg Cantor's proof of the degrees of infinity, to name a few--without being forced to sacrifice my interest in other matters. I was able to develop other aspects of my facility with language and argument by writing about Euripides, Chaucer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Leo Tolstoy.

I soon found other means of developing these skills. I joined the literary magazine, became a co-editor, merged it with the student newspaper, and helped give birth to a new publication. I learned a lot about proofreading, journalism, and graphic design along the way. This publication, The Moon, is now devoted to news, commentary, and literature, and offers students a chance to communicate with each other about issues of concern to everyone, and also to share poetry, fiction, art, and photography. The Moon also provides a two-way conduit between the College's administration and the students. Students comment on administrative policy, and administrators often respond directly to student editorials. As the editor, I am proud of the quality of work from which I must choose when deciding how to fill the pages of each issue. As a whole, student writing is thoroughly developed and eloquently expressed, and I assume from this that I am not the only Johnnie who has benefited from our unique education.

But the forum provided by The Moon does not appeal to everyone. Others with an interest in writing choose instead the poetry study groups, the occasional writing workshops, or the annual poetry slam. The wonderful thing about the freedom of the St. John's extracurricular program is that anyone with enough motivation can organize or adapt a group of any kind. In past years, the fictions of Jorge Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tom Robbins, and Franz Kafka, among others, have been the subject of student-organized study groups, not to mention a number of foreign language study groups: Russian, German, and Hebrew come to mind. If a particular interest isn't represented, we simply find an interested tutor, post flyers, and a new student organization is born.

For all these reasons, I really do believe that St. John's offers the most fertile ground for self-determination. Decide what you want to be, and become it. It's that simple. There are few impediments.