Like many Tritons, acceptance-rate statistics and unimportant Newsweek articles trumpeting UCSD’s revered standing in public education have led me to believe I am extremely intelligent. Since I became a college student, my sense of authority has skyrocketed, nourished from A’s in my Dimensions of Culture courses and my ability to successfully integrate the word ‘plethora’ into a sentence. I figured that if I could write six pages on the prevalence of heteronormativity in public media, then I must be brilliant.
Last quarter, I brought this inflated mindset with me to France, assuming that a language barrier wouldn’t necessarily discredit my hard-earned superiority. I practiced conjugations, read worksheets on French culture and even mentally prepared myself to eat frogs’ legs. I likened the experience to an essay: some light research and a collection of big vocabulary words, and I’d be set.
But when I arrived in Lyon, eager to prove that my three quarters of French at UCSD had paid off, I opened my mouth to ask a pedestrian directions and he reacted as if I had spewed sizzling diarrhea onto his face. Disgusted at my incomprehensible attempt at communication, he walked away shaking his head, sans explanation or aid.
Hoping that I’d just encountered an unusually mean French man, I pieced together another plea for direction and asked the next passerby. This one was much more sympathetic, and after a speedy explanation, she stopped to ask if I understood. I stared blankly and I nodded my head up and down. I understood nothing.
As she walked away, I knew it was official: I was an idiot. Within the span of two minutes I had lost my ability to improvise and the respect that came with it. As I wandered the streets to search for a map, I felt completely worthless. No one cared if I was a member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, or how many Nobel laureates were employed at my university; without the actual ability to communicate, I was just some weird clueless foreign girl.
As time went by in France, my misunderstandings became routine.’ I’d come home to my host family at 3 p.m., oblivious to the fact that I’d agreed to meet them at 1 p.m. the day before. I’d arrive empty-handed in class without knowing my professor had assigned us several pages of homework at our last meeting. And I eventually realized people didn’t really expect me to understand what was going on in the first place, so I just stopped bothering to put on an intelligent front.
After returning to the United States and being plopped back into UCSD’s snooty academic bubble, I was disappointed to spend my first week of school listening to students namedrop obscure novels and throw around college buzzwords like ‘diaspora’ or ‘hegemony’ in a desperate attempt to be recognized as a legitimate human being. Not only is it exhausting to participate in stilted conversation, but half the people who use those words don’t even know what they mean anyway.
As graduation day approaches, we’d all do well to stop hiding behind superficial markers of intelligence and face the real world as inexperienced twits who can quote The Joy Luck Club but don’t know how to use a fax machine. And as we’re all hopelessly pressing buttons and swearing at office contraptions, maybe then we can step back, realize how ridiculously illegitimate our education was and have a good laugh.