Give or take a few weeks, it's been a year since Columbia Pictures released The Social Network, the tenebrously-filmed, factually-ambiguous account of Mark Zuckerberg's nascent career as the father of Facebook. While the film's aesthetic was gloomy and its script strayed from fact – one third a subtle nod to Kurosawa's legal classic Rashomon, two thirds Sorkinian creative license – one truth resonates from it, and brightly so. Zuckerberg, as exemplified by his (Jesse Eisenberg's) penchant for sweatshirts, flip-flops, and wry insouciance, was and is still a kid.
More specifically, he was a college student.
This is perhaps the film's saving grace: audiences' awe at the intellectual and ethical tempo of the story before them would likely be less profound if its players were, say, forty-five and balding. Precocity, it seems, sells: the impressiveness of success is inversely proportionate to the age of its perpetrator.
Apply that postulate to Hopkins – a venerable institution, and rightly so, with 37 Nobel Laureates under its blue-and-black belt and the world's most-cited research to boot. The myriad successes of Hopkins' faculty invites a Zuckerbergian proposition – what about its students? Where are the tipsy sophomores sitting in Charles Commons, crushed cans of Natty Boh afoot, programming a revolution?
Though ostensibly vibrant, the tenor of Hopkins' undergraduate community skips this crucial beat. It would be erroneous to discredit intellect and unfair to chalk it up to a sheer lack of innovation. Getting in here is tough; all who do possess some sort of qualifying factor – be it cerebral, creative, or, yes, athletic – that conveyed, or even whispered, a potential for greatness, though the term is reductionist.
And reductionism does not qualify apathy. Speaking generally, Hopkins students limit their innovative sparks to the Cold War catacombs of the Milton S. Eisenhower library, channeling intellectual fervor into focusing on – to use a hackneyed example – Organic Chemistry. This example functions not to neglect the merits of devout academia, which, at a school like Hopkins (or Zuckerberg's almost-alma mater, which shall remain nameless) is instrumental to survival. Rather, it serves to bemoan the pervasive notion on campus that studying is mutually exclusive with, well, everything else.
Hopkins is first and foremost an academic institution – no one can contest this. In the case of Homewood, at least, this truth yields parasitic consequences: the hallmark rigor of this place absorbs the brainpower that could otherwise power the loudspeakers of change, of development – of betterment.
To classify all Hopkins undergraduates as apathetic or uninspired would be a gross exaggeration and unfair generalization. Homewood is ripe with fantastic minds, as those who admitted its students recognized, but markedly lacking in voices, due largely in part to pure lack of precedent. A record of tangible innovation on campus is scant beyond the sphere of the Student Government Association(SGA), whose impressive resume of improvement initiatives is marred by the near-oligarchic veneer of the group itself.
The 32 undergraduates who sit on the council have inspired phenomenal developments in the domains of student and academic life, relying heavily on broader input from the student body at large for said strokes of inspiration.
The problem, though, is that these are 32 students among Hopkins' 5000 undergraduates: a near-nugatory fraction, albeit a passionate one. As a member of the student government myself, I can humbly confess that there are minds much, much brighter than my own on this campus, minds that can change the world in ways that I – and so many others, at Hopkins or Harvard or anywhere else – could never conceive. Charisma is no prerequisite: Zuckerberg's classmates likely would not have elected him to the Harvard undergraduate council.
So come out of the woodwork, be it Building B, PJs, or a white-walled laboratory in Mudd. This university – and your time at it – are yours for the taking, yours for making all the better. Quash apathy and fear not the wild idea or the obscure train of thought: remember, Facebook began when a twenty-year-old gawky CompSci major was drunk and pissed off. Relish the protectorate bubble of college: no matter how you fare, your parents are still paying your bills.
And for Christ's sake, don't be a pre-med if you're not positively enamored with anatomy – there are better ways to spend your time, and they likely correlate directly to that about which you are legitimately passionate. Trust me, your parents will forgive you. And, maybe, your university will thank you.
