This is a personal account of the importance of being open to new ideas at university and beyond.

What Does it Mean to be ‘Open’?

According to the Big 5 Personality Traits – the leading psychological theory of personality, also known as the OCEAN Model – ‘Openness’ can be defined as the trait of seeking out new experiences and being receptive to different views and people. The other four aspects of personality are ‘Conscientiousness’ (being organised, reliable, self-disciplined), ‘Extraversion’ (confident and enthusiastic engagement with others), ‘Agreeableness’ (the extent to which you prioritise ‘social harmony’ over individual needs), and ‘Neuroticism’ (sensitivity to negative emotion).

 

As with the other four personality traits, ‘Openness’ can be broken down into constituent dimensions. Roughly speaking, these include being attentive to inner feelings, imaginative, sensitive to aesthetics, intellectually curious, challenging authority, and pursuing variety.

 

The beauty of the Big 5 Model is that scoring 0, or 100, or anything close to these ends of the spectrum, is not ideal. For example, a person with no imagination is, rather obviously, unlikely to ever move forward in life, but on the other hand, a person who lives out fantasies in their head the entire time is unlikely to ever get anything done! There is no ‘perfect score’. Rather, every person has a unique matrix of personality traits.

Are You Really That Open?

A statistical analysis based on a sample of c.30,000 people revealed that the average score for Openness is 73. Many people who believe themselves to be open are in fact only open according to a limited definition of the term.

 

Arriving at university, I was eager to meet new people and revel in the arts and humanities. However, there were immediate limits to the misguided conception of my own openness, stemming from the fact that I had already crystallised in my mind the exact nature of the career that I wanted to pursue. Accordingly, I needed to understand exactly how each piece of material that I was being taught was going to manifest itself in my career.

 

This is Problem #1. Whilst it is hugely beneficial, perhaps even necessary, to have an idea of the career that you would like to pursue, and in some sense are already pursuing, you must resist this idea turning into a concrete finish line. The career, profession, world that you will enter in three or so years’ time will not be the same as it is now.

Transferrable Skills

When I was tasked, during the first term of my first year at university, with researching the role of goblins in Korean folklore, I could not comprehend how this material would ever feature in my future career and research. On the one hand I was right, in that I have never used and almost completely forgotten all of the information which was taught in this module. However, the skills that I honed during these weeks (dealing with texts in foreign languages, using images as primary sources, researching previously unstudied topics at the vanguard of human knowledge, using cutting-edge software to notate my findings, etc.) have stayed with me ever since. Sometimes ‘transferrable skills’ are taught as modules in their own right, but most of the time when we are honing such abilities we don’t even realise it. To ‘get to the top’ in almost any profession requires you to think well, write well, and speak well. If you find yourself improving in any of these three areas while completing a task, you can be sure that you are in the process of becoming a more capable and dynamic individual.

Everything is Connected

Everything is connected, you just might not know it yet.

 

Over the course of my undergraduate degree, I came to better understand the influence that new ideas and seemingly irrelevant ideas were having on my academic and personal formation. However, I was, what I now understand to be, left-hemisphere dependent. By this I mean that I was inclined to view things in isolation, draw perceptual boundaries around the material gleaned from different areas of my life, and fail to recognise that everything is connected.

 

This is Problem #2. Do not be blind to the infinite undercurrents and invisible connections between the problem you are working on and the wider world.

 

Many, if not most, universities require students to complete a dissertation as part of their undergraduate degree. This can be anywhere in the region of 5,000 to 20,000+ words and is often completed during the final year of study. My dissertation concerned a seminal Cuban figure of whose works I thought myself relatively familiar. I studied his output, studied what others had said about him, and responded with personal insight. For the record, these were all valuable points of departure.

 

However, the feedback that I received noted that the dissertation draft was somewhat superficial and lacking depth. So, for my second draft I went away, added further facts and figures, and expanded on some of the shorter paragraphs and sections.

 

However, again, the feedback that I received commented on the surface-level nature of my work. I was recommended to go away and ‘research areas such as aesthetics and postmodernism’. Dutifully, being relatively high in conscientiousness, I went to the library and borrowed books on these two topics. I drafted two new dissertation abstracts, one concerning the role of aesthetics in the work of my chosen figure, and the other concerning postmodernism in the works of my chosen figure. The only (large!) problem was that I knew very little on either of these areas. Confusion ensued, and I was back to the drawing board.

 

It was only during my master’s degree that I fully realised what my undergraduate supervisor was actually encouraging me to do. He was not asking me to change the focus of my research and write a philosophy dissertation, but he was encouraging me to stop viewing my figure in isolation. We are all shaped by the cultural, linguistic, philosophical, and psychological currents of our time and the developments throughout time that has led to them. Previous modules, such as my first-year module on the long nineteenth century, and my second-year module on new directions in twentieth-century thought, did not exist in isolation. Rather, they served to equip me with a holistic and informed understanding of why the world exists as it does today. Everything is connected.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step

For many students about to start at university, making friends is the most daunting task. For others, it is the fear of receiving poor grades, not being sure what to do after their agree, or even learning how to cook! For me, I was most unsettled when confronted with an intellectual field with which I had no prior familiarity, such as with aesthetics, such as with postmodernism, and such as with the Korean goblins. In these instances, remember the Chinese proverb ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’. An undergraduate degree is not a PhD. At this stage in life you are not expected to be a world expert. Rather, you are learning how to deal with difficult concepts and integrate them across various domains of academia and life. The three or four years that is customary to complete an undergraduate degree provide you with the time to explore the nooks and crannies of your discipline, but also its connections to others. Learn to relish being lost and outside of your comfort zone. Whenever you are confronted with an entirely new topic, set of ideas, or seemingly infinite mountain to climb, remember that everything is connected – attack each and every side of your degree with openness, and the map of your life will emerge.

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