Austen, I think if you had to boil it down to a few words, then yes I would agree that all it takes to move in the right direction is to open your eyes to humanity. Based on our discussion about Bartleby, if we do a meaningful reflection of what we wanted and, as AJ points out, recognize that this institution has jaded our perception about what it really means to be stress and what it really means to feel pressure, then we’d see that there is no shortage of Bartleby-like ghosts right outside of JG. The path toward finding our purpose takes a different shape for everyone, but I think the first step is by starting to ask the right questions – about other people, about yourself, about relationships between people. I’m realizing now that I’m just starting to do that and getting really uncomfortable with how much I don’t know about myself. It’s an interesting revelation for me in particular because I actually felt oddly prepared for EIP before this class. In other words, I wasn’t fearful at all about doing interviews. Most the part, I actually feel really comfortable during interviews. (And just to confirm that I really don’t have too big of a head, I am terribly shy when I have speak up in big groups or in class). I thought I mostly performed well in interviews because I knew myself and what I wanted. I made sure that before heading into an interview that I could anticipate any question an interviewer had about me. But the reality is, is that I know myself exceptionally well…on paper. You can shoot anything at me as long as it’s something that I was prepared to reveal on paper. I realized quickly this semester that there are a lot of things about myself that I am deathly scared of revealing – all things that you would never see on my resume, of course. I used to feel really proud of how well I could perform under this kind of pressure, but now I see really how much of it was a performance and how much of it was fear.

-- LizzieGomez - 29 Mar 2012