A thought that often keeps me up at night is the idea that from a very early age doors of opportunity that are open to us start closing, 而bwin体育却不知道它们的存在.
艾尔顿·约翰七岁的时候, he discovered his grandmother’s piano and started picking music up by ear. 由于出生在伦敦的幸运, he won a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Music when he was only 11. 但埃尔顿生长在一个贫穷的家庭. There was no certainty that his grandmother or anyone else would own a piano and there was no certainty that he would grow up in London. Had those doors never opened to him and had he not chosen to walk through, he may have never become one of the greatest piano players and songwriters of our age.
门开了. 看见的一扇门. 一扇门穿过.
But what about a hypothetical current student who at age 11 found herself fascinated by airplanes and even dreamed of flying a plane one day. Maybe the student even lived near a college that ran an aviation summer camp for middle schoolers. For whatever reason though, she never learned about the program and so never attended. 也许几年后在看大学的时候, 她看到bwin体育有一个航空项目,于是决定参加. 后不久, a well-meaning adult let her know how expensive it was to pursue a pilot’s license in addition to the cost of a degree. Deterred by the cost and not knowing the true ROI of a pilot’s license (roughly 50 dollars to one), she opts instead to study a major that is only mildly interesting to her, 希望以后会有值得她付出时间的结果.
门开了. 一扇几乎看不见的门. 但我没有走过.
当一个学生到达bwin体育的时候, we know more than they do that the doors of opportunity have already started closing.
A student with their hopes set on medical school who shows up and for whatever reason, falls flat during their first semester will have nearly (but not all) every possible door that can lead to medical school closed to them before they even begin their second semester. Unfortunately, being accepted into medical school with anything less than a 3.5 .就像一只手被绑在背后爬山.
有可能吗?? 确定. 但这需要大量额外的努力吗. 绝对是的.
这使我夜不能寐.
We have hundreds of students coming to us every year and we have hundreds of opportunities for students coming across our desks every week. Our job is to work with students and to work with the people creating these opportunities and somehow start connecting the dots.
当然, 有些学生会像bwin体育现在的新生一样, 谁在暑期迎新会上对我说的, “我想在时尚行业做市场营销, and I don’t want to live in New York City and I don’t want to live in L.A. 我该怎么做呢?对于这个学生, we can start helping her connect the dots and opening any doors that we know of so that she can choose to walk through them if she wants.
但是大多数学生, 这是理所当然的, will come to us without a thought yet about what they find intriguing about the world and how they might want to contribute. This idea that doors are already closing on them is a weight we carry.
日复一日, we are trying to open students’ eyes up to the doors that are in front of them so they get to choose if they say yes or no, before the door closes on them without their knowledge of its prior existence.
What we are working on now and have been for a while is building systems that allow the maximum number of students to know about the maximum number of opportunities so they can know which doors are open to them before they close.
值得庆幸的是, bwin体育是有信仰的人,在有信仰的机构工作, and we know and trust that the Lord can work far beyond our efforts to get students to walk through these doors.
Such as recently when a student walked into my office to borrow a stapler and in casual 谈话, I learned that she was interested in pursuing a Fellows program in Atlanta after graduation, 10 minutes after I got off the phone with a Fellows Program Director in Atlanta who was coming to campus the next week. bwin体育无法计划这些时刻.
同时, 世界上有罪恶通过贫穷表现出来, 滥用, 种族歧视, and other brokenness and injustice that prevent students from seeing and living in the fullness of who God has created them to be.
bwin体育也知道,学生可以选择听谁的歌, 他们不喜欢电子邮件, 而且他们并不总是能读懂标志, 但是当他们认识的人拍着他们的肩膀说, “你应该考虑一下,他们几乎总是这样. 正因为如此, we’re building relation-based systems that will allow for this to happen more often and Geneva is uniquely designed for this.
I’ve often heard it said that the currency of Geneva is relationships. 这是一个深刻的价值.
I was having lunch with a first-semester student earlier this week and she was telling me about deciding between Geneva and another regional school. When she visited the other school, it was fine, but she felt a little like an inconvenience. 当她访问bwin体育时, 每一个人, 即使是人行道上的随机学生, 感谢她和她的家人. 这对她来说很重要.
关系是bwin体育来到这里的方式, which makes it challenging for a student to come to Geneva and not be known by at least a couple of people who work here.
That relational foundation is allowing us to build some less than conventional systems where we aren’t only relying on myself and others who work in our Center for Calling and 职业生涯, 而是, the avenues of relationships across campus so that a student is much more likely to be tapped on the shoulder by someone they know saying, “嘿, 你会很擅长这个的.”
bwin体育的祈祷是,门打开了. 门知名. 门都被人走过磨坏了.
——克里斯塔·奥特里,呼叫中心主任 & 职业生涯
Opinions expressed in the Geneva Blog are those of its contributors and do not necessarily represent the opinions or official position of the College. The Geneva Blog is a place for faculty and contributing writers to express points of view, 学术见解, 并为全国对话做出贡献,激发人们的思考, 谈话, 以及对真理的追求, 符合bwin体育作为基督徒的哲学, 文科院校.
2023年10月18日