I learned nothing at Georgetown and that’s OK

Four years ago, when I first stepped foot into Georgetown, I had never even tried hummus in my life. While my home country, Singapore, is a very cosmopolitan place, the boundaries of my imagination were still very limited. Beyond possessing a repository of facts about the world acquired through our apparently excellent education system, I could not envision the world in real, practical terms, with all its different shades and flavors.

Today, on the cusp of graduating from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (SFS), I am proud to say that I have tried hummus—and so much more. I now know that I once had the names of all the capital cities of the world in my head, thanks to the infamous SFS requirement, Map of the Modern World. More significantly, I have picked up two new languages to a somewhat conversational level, as well as broadened my awareness of the world through the wide array of classes and extracurricular activities the university has on offer.

That said, while I did come into the SFS not knowing about the world, I cannot say that I will leave it all worldly and wise. Instead, my biggest takeaway from the SFS is the knowledge that I know nothing about the world.

Yes, nothing.

This is the curse of being in the SFS, in Georgetown, or in any field of study that demands a critical perspective toward the world. We learn broad theories about international relations, but also encounter the many instances in which they do not apply. We speak of notions like liberties and identities as if they are explanatory factors by themselves, but then realize that they can all be deconstructed into a confusing constellation of interconnected minutiae. At the individual level, we try to immerse ourselves in another culture, but we soon discover that cultures are not something to be acquired, they are perpetually shifting labyrinths that can never be completely mapped.

Indeed, in learning about the world, we learn that the world cannot be learnt. Every nook and cranny in this planet has its own history, everyone has a story. Of course, virtually all of us realize that understanding the world in its entirety is impossible. Yet, few of us acknowledge that the little we know about them is also fraught with contingency. After all, the mere act of framing a phenomenon into a model necessitates the overlooking of something—and we often overlook how we ourselves overlook certain things.

Hence, my point in asserting that I have learnt nothing in the SFS is not to belittle the achievements of the program or Georgetown as a whole. Rather, it is to force us to rethink some of our assumptions as we reflect on our respective intellectual journeys through college. It is so easy to enter the working world, padded resumes in hand, with our achievements inventoried and displayed for the world to see. Nevertheless, the world does not work like that; it is not a list of things to be acquired, attained, or checked off a bucket list. Knowledge is not quantitative, but qualitative. Everything you can possibly perceive in this world is dynamic, fluid, and transient—and approaching them is best done with a sense of humility.

A vocabulary centered on nothingness rather than attainment, deficiency rather than achievement, will therefore much more helpful, especially for us seniors, as we mull over the completion of all our undergraduate classes and look forward into the future. There is really no need to remind ourselves of our own accomplishments; there will be enough social constructs promulgated during our graduation and in society-at-large to do that. Instead, consider just how ignorant we all are of the immensity of the world and all its constituent parts, and how myopic we can be as we gaze at not only at others but even within ourselves. We are not so great, after all.

Armed with this awareness that all of us really know nothing, we can then look to our impending graduation from Georgetown not as an end, but as the beginning of so much more.