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KhurramDaraSecondPaper 8 - 29 Jun 2012 - Main.KhurramDara
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Why it's hard for me to be creative | | | I remember Eben talking about law journals, saying that we probably wouldn’t care much for the work, but that we want the “fruit salad.” I think the “fruit salad” might be part of the reason we can’t, or rather, have a hard time being creative. It's a fixation with credentials. Everyone seems to be obsessed with “fruit salad,” at least with respect to education. When you’re a child, for some, it’s about which primary or secondary school you attend. The prestige is important. Once you’re in school, regardless of whether you’re in a private or a public school, “fruit salad” is very important. You want to be involved in a certain number of “extracurricular” activities, for purposes of "building" your resume. You want to have an impressive internship. You want to take the most “Advanced Placement” courses, and make the honor roll. It’s all about getting into the best college. So you’ll take a class or get a tutor to help you score however high it is you need to score on the SAT. You’ll read about what colleges look for, but everyone knows it’s about the numbers and the “fruit salad.” How many National Merit Scholarship recipients can the college say they admitted? How many valedictorians and salutatorians are in the freshman class? How many of the newly admitted students scored in the top 90th percentile on the SAT? In our case, as students with aspirations of attending professional school, it was the same thing all over again. We needed to get a certain LSAT score and have a certain GPA, and maybe, if our “fruit salad” was made from the freshest of fruits, it could help us out. It’s so the Columbia Law class profile can indicate how high our median LSAT score is, and so Dean Schizer can talk about how many Fulbright Scholars were in the entering class at his next fundraiser. And then we apply for jobs at big law firms. Who want to boast the number of federal clerks they hired, or how many former Harvard Law Review editors they employ.
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< | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well--it makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. Which means for most of our professional lives, our work will only be as good as the directions that precede it. | >
> | It’s not that this process is entirely without any utility. It’s just that it requires little, if any creativity. This structure does do one thing very well--it makes us all really good, I mean really good, at following directions. Which means for most of our professional lives, our work will only be as good as the directions that precede it. Of course, it is necessary to ask whether such a system will still exist. That is to say, what happens if simply acquiring the fruit salad doesn't guarantee you any sort of employment? Then if not for the sake of creativity, then perhaps for the sake of our own careers, we ought to move away from this fixation on credentials. | | | |
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