Almost everything I’ve learned in college I’ve read.

All that I’ve figured out about myself and what I want to do with my future has come from assigned class readings. Being at college is so much about figuring out what you want your life to be, the overused-if-applicable idea of four years to “find yourself.” Experimenting with every brand of political work or interning on the Hill weren’t what I needed to “find myself.” Reading for class helped me accomplish that.

When I entered GW, people would ask me what I wanted to do within the broad major I had selected: political science. I never had a good answer. I had spent my whole life in school and around professors and teachers, so maybe I’d be an academic pumping out endless research. Or, living blocks away from the White House, maybe I could go work there.

But I didn’t have to ponder on it too long. Once classes got started, I booted up Blackboard and read dense political science research about everything from Abraham Lincoln movies to the contemporary state of play in the Japanese economy. I found a lot of the papers poorly written and tautological. I had a hard time seeing the point of producing hundreds of pages of scholarship to prove that presidents want to be reelected.

I had some past flirtations with academia, but all this reading clarified that it wasn’t a path I was ultimately interested in. Spending all that time reading papers that could’ve been boiled down to an abstract wasn’t a waste of time because it showed me exactly what I didn’t want to do.

In my sophomore year, through a series of last-minute desperate adds and drops to take any class related to American politics, I stumbled into a constitutional law class. The course assigned tons of case texts to read, and, as dorky as it sounds, I fell in love with Supreme Court decisions. I adored the dialogue between judges and across cases, and the way logic was at times strongly effective and sometimes unbelievably poorly applied.

I came into college vehemently opposed to law school. It sounded like such a drag — so much work for a job I’m not sure I’d love. But the readings engaged a logical, history-adoring side of my brain I hadn’t tapped into.

Course texts can get tedious, but there’s something to be said for the fact that, a lot of the time, there’s genuine enjoyment to be found from reading. Classes have introduced me to writers I’d not previously encountered but now semi-obsess over, to the only occasional annoyance of my friends. I first got exposed to Joan Didion in a class on American Conservatism — now hardly a day passes where I don’t try and work the author and her excellent observational writing into conversation.

I was also assigned Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” during a Modern American Cultural History course. The cover with Smith and her paramour Robert Mapplethorpe now sits prominently on my bookshelf as a personal favorite because of the portrait the book paints of being young in New York City.

I might’ve never found these works and authors, that have become such a core of who I am and what I love, had I not done the readings assigned for my classes. Pouring myself into reading has shown me what I want and don’t want in my life and career. It’s true that my career prospects probably won’t be affected if, after I finish writing this article, I watch a movie instead of finishing Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” for my class tomorrow.

But maybe the memoir will give me some ideas of future writers and books to check out, or perspectives on the world to add to my own. So I’d better hit the books.

 Nick Perkins, a senior majoring in political science, is the culture editor.