CAS Class Day 2007
Excerpts from the Class Day Student Speech
by Noah K. Goldstein (CAS'07)

"Any More Questions?"

When I arrived here at BU four years ago, there were a lot of things that I didn’t know. I didn’t know who I was, or where I would be four years later. I didn’t know what I would learn, in classes or out. I didn’t know who I would meet or what roles they would play in my life.

But there was something that trumps all of that: I didn’t really know why I was here. I thought I knew why I was here: to get an education, to study biology and ecology with a side of humanities and social sciences. I was here for that, but I was also here for something greater. I was here to create a story and to ask some big questions, and to answer some of them, and to learn how to wait for answers yet to come.

Let’s take a look back on freshman year—wow, freshman year. I was taking the sink-or-swim weed-out class, Chem 101, with all the other pre-meds and bio majors. I had the good fortune of studying with Professor Straub, a fantastic man with such a love for teaching, chemistry, and . . . colored chalk. He really knew how to explain things, and how to bring chemistry to life, and how to draw beautiful pictures with his colored chalk, and he made exciting demonstrations which set off fire alarms. I remember at a review session before an exam he was explaining something. “Any other questions?” he asked. The room was quiet. I’m not entirely sure why or where it came from, but I asked him, mostly as a joke, “What is the meaning of life?” He looked up at the ceiling, crooked his head the way he always does when thinking about how to answer a question, looked back down at me and said, “Life has whatever meaning you give it, I guess.” I smiled, nodded, and we went back to chemistry. I did pretty well in that class, but what sticks with me is that moment.

Looking back on that moment I realize that I came to BU searching for more than just knowledge, friends, and new experiences. I came searching for meaning. I also understand now the importance of meaning and why I was searching for it. We need meaning, we search for it, yearn for it, we feel empty without it, and so we create it! Why do we need meaning? Because we are more than just animals. Whether as the product of evolution which led to our complex brains with intricate circuiting and hence complicated psychological needs, or whether we’ve been endowed with a divine soul by a higher entity, or whether you can conjure for yourself a way to accept both of those possibilities as fact, we need meaning. We want our lives to be meaningful.

I’m as surprised as anyone else to stand here and say that while I didn’t even realize I was searching, I found it. I found what makes life meaningful. But I’m not going to tell you, because what makes my life meaningful isn’t necessarily what’s going to make your life meaningful. As Professor Straub said, “Life has whatever meaning YOU give it.” I am going to say that it’s more difficult to construct meaning in our society; a society that tends focus more on comfort than on meaning. Comfort is nice, but it’s not meaningful, and it is fleeting. Meaning sticks with you. It holds your hand, picks you up, and drives you forward. We can create meaning out of strife and pain, out of struggles, and out of “failures,” we can create meaning even in the darkest places, places that comfort can never go. Confronting those dark places is an inevitable part of life. In Core, Professor Nelson explained that we can gain wisdom through suffering. I believe that infusing suffering with meaning is an integral part to attaining that wisdom.

What do I mean by meaning? Purpose. Underlying principles that guide your decisions. We’re talking about your life. Not somebody else’s life, but your life, and you can do with it whatever you want; you can go anywhere. But what do you want? Where do you want to go?

I can’t answer those questions for you, but I can tell you another interesting thing I learned in freshman chemistry, this time second semester with Professor Grinstaff, also a great guy, young and new, and he gave me a brownie when I went to his office hours for help. I needed help because I couldn’t stay focused in a class that ran from 5-6:30 at night. I guess I’m a morning person. We learned about entropy. Essentially, the idea behind entropy is that things tend toward the lowest state of energy; everything tends toward disorder. Everything has a half-life, not just plutonium. To me this explains a lot in life: my messy room, people’s preference to take a nap or watch TV. over say, going to the gym; the fact that things fall apart. Yet, I look around me, and I see a tremendous amount of order. Starting with the basics of life, on a cellular level, on the organism level, we’re so complex and so ordered, and it takes so much energy. I walk down Comm. Ave and see these huge buildings and I think, they really tend towards disorder, yet, we order them. And there’s this wonderful, beautiful, fascinating thing about life: it goes against a fundamental law of chemistry. It struggles against entropy and says, “No, I will survive, I will stay ordered, and damn it, I’ll perpetuate this process before I die!” Very interesting, entropy.

I was able to make that connection between chemistry and life partially because of one of my first biology lectures. Thanks to Professor Sorenson I learned that mathematics is the basis for all science. Physics is based on math; chemistry is rooted in physics, and biology in chemistry. It’s beautiful. But there’s something about life that’s unique (with all due respect to physics and chemistry, and trust me, I have a lot of respect for physics and chemistry). Life, is . . . well, it’s alive. And it’s a struggle. It’s survival of the fittest, and it’s a constant process of refinement of itself, a constant process of change and growth, and it’s beautiful. Life is about improvement. You see it in nature. That’s what evolution is: selection of organisms that can cope with new difficulties and adapt to new situations. I saw this beautifully exemplified in the rainforests of Ecuador and in the islands of the Galapagos; dynamic ecosystems full of majestic organisms. And these organisms are competing; they’re challenging each other to improve. We’re here to overcome challenges too, to improve ourselves and the world around us. The system we live in was set up with an intrinsic force bearing us down, a force of entropy trying to pull us apart. We have the wonderful privilege of life, an opportunity to grow and to bring things together. To raise things up to higher states of energy and propel things forward toward better states of being.

We’ve been working on this for the past four years. We’ve been raising our own potential higher and higher. How? Through learning, and that’s what we’ll do whenever we want to grow and improve. We’ll learn more and accumulate more potential. Let’s celebrate this beautiful benchmark, the culmination of four years of hard work towards better selves, but let’s not stop here. Let’s never stop learning, never stop raising our potential. Let us apply our potential to important things, to good things, to beautiful things, to meaningful things.