Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every Friday as a sort-of exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

To Regret, Or Not To Regret? That Is the Question.

I’m sorry to make an immediate Harry Potter reference, but I feel it’s necessary.  In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Dumbledore tells Harry the following:

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Dumbledore is very wise.

Occasionally I have moments of profound introspection about my life.  This in and of itself is not profound or unusual - the more I talk to my friends, the more I realize we all seem to do this from time to time.  I always smile to myself after I’ve had one of these moments, because the cliche really is true: hindsight is 20/20.  There are loads of things I’ve done or choices I’ve made that if I had known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have done things the same way.  Again, not really a profound conclusion to reach.

But do I regret anything?

My answer to that question historically has been ‘no.’  I think what we do with our lives ,and the experiences we have as the result of our decisions, make us who we are.  I would not be me if I hadn’t made mistakes and learned from them, or not learned from them.  And I think the same is true for everyone.

So imagine my surprise over this past weekend when I found myself admitting that I regret something.  I will not bore you with the details of the thought process that led to this particular revelation – suffice it to say, I was thinking about college and courses and why I took what I took.  And it hit me: I went to an amazing college, and it took me until my final year or so there to truly take advantage of the opportunities that afforded me.

So here it is: I truly regret not having pushed myself harder to try some of everything while I was at William and Mary.

I could have learned multiple languages – when I was there they offered about ten.  Instead, I took one semester of Russian and then wussed out and switched to Spanish so I could be done with my foreign language requirement.  I am kicking myself for that now.  I could have taken physics and therefore been eligible to apply to graduate programs in astrophysics, but instead I chose to only take biology and chemistry because that was the bare minimum required for my major.  Williamsburg is in a fantastic spot for really digging into (haha – Whitney, do you appreciate my play on words?) America’s past, but I avoided all courses that involved any type of work outside the classroom.  And if I hadn’t been so busy messing around, I would have switched majors much earlier and I would have been able to go on a major Alvin cruise with my eventual advisor – who took her entire lab with her on that cruise and made sure every student got to go down in Alvin to the hydrothermal vent sites at least once.  I missed that by only a year.

So, while I know I did what I did for a reason, and that dwelling on the past is never good, I have to say I regret the way I handled my undergraduate experience.  I can never get it back, and that makes me sad.

If you want to read Whitney’s take on regret, check out her blog here.

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