5 Year College Reunion

It’s been a week since I returned to campus for my 5 year college reunion. It took that week, a week of vacation no less, to fully reflect on the reunion, putting it into perspective with the five years since graduation and the four years at Harvard that preceded it.

The most interesting question I was asked over the course of the weekend: do you think you changed more in college or since college?

I think a lot about change. Successful adaptation to change, for me, is the ultimate skill for individuals and organizations: if you can do it well and consistently, that gives you the closest feeling to lasting security. But where lies the boundary between successful adaptation and holding firm on important, core beliefs?

Many major life changes occur as events that impact you rather than changes from within you. Those events then certainly change your daily life and, thereby, your beliefs, ideas, and ideals. We are glorified, carbon-based decision-making algorithms, the amalgamations of our life events, “large experience models”.

The most pleasant surprise: every single person I spoke to reflected openly and thoughtfully on their past five years.

No sign of the first year “one-upping on the verge of bragging” that accompanied nearly every (nonetheless fun!) conversation back when we all first arrived on campus. Maybe COVID made it universally clear that everyone experiences ups and downs. Practically no one was still on the exact same path they started on five years ago.

Undeniably, the daily lives of most college graduates change 1,000x more in the five years after graduation than during the three to four years they spend in school. College-me would not have made most of the decisions leading up to the changes I experienced since graduation. But that transformation was not sudden; over the course of four years at Harvard, I gradually progressed along what I can retrospectively define as a clear trajectory of development.

The thing I had totally forgotten: we wrote these letters to ourselves around graduation.

I care about people and freedom and responsibility and mindful decisions. I don’t care about 30 under 30 or income brackets or job titles or followers. I have what I care about, mostly to the extent that I would like to have it. I also have some of the things I don’t care about, so they’re supposedly “easy” for me to not care about; others I lack, and a slightly different version of me probably would have cared about them very much. Did I choose these or did they derive from events that occurred?

Five years ago, when I wrote that letter, nine years ago, even twelve years ago when I first left Germany to spend my year in Wisconsin, I like to think I would not have judged who I am today. I would have disagreed with my present self; I would have pegged the likelihood of aspects of this version of myself turning out to be real at a relatively low percentage; I might even have been in disbelief with some parts of it. But I would have understood, empathized, and not judged.

Maybe that’s the boundary: as long as you don’t feel like you have to apologize to your past self, your important, core beliefs are intact.