Philosophy of Law, Essay Example

Self motivation is essential for college students because, for many of them, it replaces the parental motivation that served them well-enough in high school to get them into college in the first place. Many, perhaps most, college students leave home when they go to college. That means they have to increasingly manage their own abilities and discover for themselves their own enthusiasms for academic subjects. This is hard enough for students who merely leave home for another city or state. But for international students, the need for self motivation is even greater. International students don’t only leave home. They leave their culture and, all too often, their friends and their native language. Their need for an inner guiding star is paramount.

Money and grades are of course two standbys for student motivation. If we don’t get the grades, we won’t get the money from home. (For those of us who are paying our own way, if we don’t get the grades we can spend their money on other matters.) But money and grades are external pressures. They are an extension of parental power and conscience. Without self-motivation, those two forms of guidance can compel outward achievement of goals at the expense of inward achievement of a personal goal leading to self-referential personal satisfaction. Personal satisfaction is inarguably the best path to follow in life, and the one that best contributes to professional excellence.

Only a lucky few achieve their goals that way. They are the students who, in many cases (although not all) already know what they want to do with their lives when they begin college. They are the born artists, scientists, writers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. They don’t wait to graduate from college. They combine their classes with active involvement in their chosen field, and probably started while still in high school, or even sooner. They are not bewildered by the many choices (or apparent choices) confronting them in college. Their only real obstacle is getting through their general education courses. Liberation arrives when they can finally concentrate on their passion and leave the mandated burden of boredom behind.

Alas for most students, we have our personal likes and dislikes, but we not gifted with an absolutely decisive inward light. General education courses are not only a chore, they do little to guide us. Too many of us then draw the wrong conclusion from this situation. We mistakenly learn that academic and professional success is based on discipline alone. We drive ourselves with artificial self-motivation based not on real curiosity, ambition, and desire, but with stamina born of obligation. In the old days, we were called grinds. Worse, we look at grinds and see how they have done in their lives after college. Many do quite well. Think of all the medical doctors, lawyers, and tenured academics who had to endure tremendous personal sacrifice to achieve professional recognition against a school system designed almost explicitly to flunk them out ruthlessly. Many of them hated the learning process and would never undergo it again for any reason, but, after many years of psyche-distorting effort, do in fact achieve success, even in personal terms. They are not necessarily unhappy. Thus, not even the prospect of programmatic toil in the pursuit of a target is justification for quitting and doing something easier and potentially more enjoyable. No, the mirage of possible success leads us on and on. But inevitably, the process is too much, and many of us drop out. Is happiness still a possibility?

Sure it is. Just as happiness finally arrived for those who passed through the gauntlets of memorization and sleep deprivation in the study of a series of hated subjects, so happiness can arrive for those who decide on another course of life. But they have to endure their own self-imposed gauntlet: the sense of personal failure, and the perceived appearance of failure to friends and family. But once they have do so, they have their own victory. Either way, self motivation must come, either now or later. Experience will bring it. It’s not in the college catalog.