Recipes for life

The student diet rarely gets a three-star review, unless you consider peanut butter and beer to be gourmet. Students who cook for themselves are often limited by skinny budgets and thin slices of time.

Food is not the only kind of nourishment we students forget about during the school year. I’m convinced that the years I spend studying will be some of the most self-centred years of my life. It’s all about my papers, my ambition, my future. I’m most concerned with feeding myself. While I’m preoccupied with making mac and cheese in the microwave, I forget to check on what the world around me is cooking up.

At this time of life, we students compile our cookbooks using recipes that offer advice not only on how to eat, but also on how to live. On March 15, as part of Conrad Grebel University College’s 50th-anniversary celebrations, a group of students gathered over brunch for the Big Questions Symposium.

Four faculty members from the University of Waterloo/Conrad Grebel joined us. Kelly Anthony, teaching fellow and lecturer of applied health sciences; Jeremy Bergen, professor of theology at Grebel; Kirsten Müller, professor of biology; and Hamid Tizhoosh, professor of systems design engineering, spoke about their journeys through school, career and personal life, paying particular attention to the people and experiences that shaped how they made important decisions and navigated the “big questions” that had arisen.

The questions these professors answered ranged from the logistical and personal, to the philosophical: What excites my sense of curiosity? How do I choose to balance children and career? In which country do I live, given my political views? How can my theology be both descriptive and prescriptive? What is my responsibility in acquiring knowledge?

But they weren’t there to give one-size-fits-all answers.

“It’s about sharing our own stories and finding encouragement, or even some ideas for dealing with our own big questions,” said Ed Janzen, chaplain at Conrad Grebel, who organized the event.

Each speaker responded to life in a different way, but a common theme that emerged is that they never worked through a tough recipe alone. All spoke of the importance of an academic or life mentor, someone who was not only inspiring in their professional life, but who was also willing to “walk with students,” as Anthony put it. It was someone invested in academics who also challenged them to think beyond classroom learning.

Many of us wanted to know if there was a magic formula for finding this kind of mentor, but the panelists said that for them it came down to making a connection with someone they respected and being persistent in forming a mentor/mentee relationship.

It’s this perspective on life that many students are hungry for, and much of the follow-up discussion has been about mentorship. We learn a lot in the classroom, but it is the personal stories and the lived experiences of others that really teach us.

“Part of achieving success as a person comes from recognizing and responding and living with big questions,” Janzen remarked.

The mentors we seek are not just people we admire for their work, but are individuals who have grappled with life in all its new ingredients, difficult measurements and failed recipes. If we’re serious about learning, we need to practise alongside more experienced chefs—and those chefs need to be ready to take on an assistant.

Feeding ourselves is essential, because this is the time of life to figure out how we perceive the world and how we are going to participate in it. Perhaps there is some value in a few years of self-centred exploration, but we cannot forget that our cookbooks are not complete without the batter-stained pages and hand-scribbled notes of those who have tested the recipes before us.

In the long run, we’ll be healthier for it.

Ally Siebert recently completed her second year of English literature and language studies at the University of Waterloo, Ont., living for the past two years at Conrad Grebel University College. She is originally from Ottawa, and is a member of Ottawa Mennonite Church.

--Posted May 7, 2014