What do you think is the most important thing you get out of education?

“There’s a lot you can get out of education. I think a lot of people have the idea that it’s just to gain knowledge about a particular field or a particular set of skills that you need for the “real world,” as we call it. But I really don’t think that’s true. I think it’s more about developing yourself as a person, and finding your own personal beliefs and values. As well as figuring out how to put that into your own life. As for me, where I’m at right now, I have no idea what I want to do with my life yet, but I’m figuring it out one day at a time and getting there. The more I go to class, the more I learn about things, the more I’m going to figure it out.”

What do you think is the most difficult thing to deal with while getting an education?

“Learning responsibility, I think, is a challenge for a lot of people, or at least is much more noticeable to me now that I’m in college and have a lot more responsibility. You expected others to be pushing you along the way as you grew up, and now you have to learn personal drive, which is something that is sort of difficult for a lot of people to do. Some always needed another to be nagging them or pushing them to go further, whereas I really think that that’s some sort of innate thing that you need to come up with by yourself at some point.”

If you could go back to your earlier self, any time before college, what would you tell yourself to prepare yourself for college, higher education, and adulthood?

“I would tell myself to care more. I feel like when I grew up, apathy was the ‘cool’ thing. That was how you made friends, by being the kid who didn’t want to do anything, saying things like ‘Whatever, life is all right, I guess.’ As is, I wish I would have cared more about school and taken more time to enjoy it and find the good in it. There’s a lot of times I look back and think that I could have made more out of that situation, and I wish that I could tell myself that I should take advantage of all of the opportunities I had.”

– Tom Damery

Beneath The Crown is a project created by Nick Theisen (‘15). It is inspired by Humans of New York (HONY) and aims to bring the community of Gustavus Adolphus College closer together by providing the perspectives of the many different people who live and work at the school.