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In class on Thursday, I found myself contemplating the reasons why I chose to attend college. While some classmates argued that they were dedicated to learning in order to further concretize their preconceived notions, others took an opposing stance and voiced their interest in using new information to challenge and reformat their beliefs. While I feel that both have occurred to me since college began, I found myself wondering about the number of opinions I’d only stumbled across as a result of the learning that has taken place since I arrived at Bryn Mawr. It’s easy to think that as an 18 year old entering a liberal arts setting, that I had already formatted my most of my most fundamental principles, but this education has helped me to engage in situations where prior knowledge is irrelevant, and I’ve had to learn how to construct an opinion based on extraneous information. 

In this way, I feel that I’ve personally evolved since arriving here. In broadening my horizons and looking critically at concepts I had once skimmed over or trusted blindly, my education has helped me to become more academically and intellectually “fit” within my environment. In continuing with a natural selection-centric metaphor, my intellectual fitness will hopefully result in a longer life (potentially for reasons such as a higher income, better medical care, healthier life choices) and would most likely result in the continued, heightened fitness of any offspring I chose to have. Essentially, despite the issues of human evolution/devolution, I’m beginning to think that the extent to which we learn is a form of modern day fitness.