Students often think professors exist only to deliver lectures, assign readings, grade exams and submit reports to their department chairs. But students often overlook the resources, advice and experience professors can offer to us outside of the classroom. This opportunity is incredibly valuable but frequently forgotten at places like GW, where students often think they can learn the most from internships and extracurriculars.
Students should not only acknowledge the value of professors but also embrace opportunities to connect with them. Many of us get so caught up in internships and pre-professional aspects of college that we forget about our professors’ knowledge and willingness to help. If we want to enhance our university experience and take the most out of it, we should be building relationships with our professors. Doing this can enhance our college experience, foster learning outside of the classroom and help prepare us to face the professional world.
Luckily, there is something designed precisely for this purpose — office hours. There is a designated time in a professor’s week where they stay in their office, sit behind their desk and wait for a student to appear behind their door and timidly call their name.
Professors have been in our exact same place. Therefore, they can understand us and act as mentors and counselors for us to face the difficulties and uncertainties of college life: finding a job, experiencing discussion and dissent and coping with doubts about our future and incomprehension. But students at GW prioritize our pre-professional culture, always more concerned with internships and the advice they can get from whatever politician they’re interning for, and the expertise of professors gets lost in their list of priorities.
Professors want us to go to office hours. They insist on it in each class and lecture. They have expressed to me how gratifying it is for them to know that the students care about their classes. They value those expressions of genuine curiosity. Washington D.C. is a great place to live in, but sometimes we can get so immersed into the professional opportunities and internships it offers that we lose track of the importance of our academic growth. Going to office hours reinforces the academic part, which is the foundation in order for us to develop in the professional world.
Many students may think of office hours as not the most efficient use of their time — they could be studying for their next exam, having a coffee, practicing a sport, just chatting about anything with their friends or chasing that hillternship. But what many fail to understand is how essential it is to get to know the person behind the lecture. In GW, students often assume that they learn enough from their professors alone, but this is not true. Office hours are the greatest invention that the American university system, and GW, has provided to students — professors can recommend you books, help you find a master’s degree, chat about politics or give you life advice. They can tell you how to study for a midterm or when to enter into politics or what to consider before entering a field. They will recommend internships and advise you on career paths or simply let you know what the workforce looks like for your major. It is an exceptional opportunity and a privilege that the GW student body should take advantage of.
Going to office hours is not just a matter of raising your grade. Professors studied for years what you are most interested in. They most probably have a doctorate in that subject, which means they spent more than five years of their lives thinking, dreaming and living for history, economics, finance, law or biology. They know what it feels like to do what many of us are thinking of doing. If you think about it, chatting with our professors is the closest thing we know to traveling in time, they’ve been in our shoes, failed and also succeeded. Many students feel overwhelmed and lost in the careers they aspire for but more than likely, our professors are the ones who help guide us and answer dozens of questions that don’t always pertain to just politics or international affairs.
This December, I have to apply for my master’s degree, which I will be starting next year at my french university. With many doubts in my head, making a final decision on which degree to pursue has been one of my greatest burdens these months. Yes, I want to be a journalist. But I also want to do research in political science, exercise diplomacy, teach about history, be a politician and an intellectual. How to choose from so many possibilities? I do not have a definitive answer yet, but I sure have some hints. I went to the fifth floor of the Elliot School to my Latin American politics professor’s office hours. In one hour and a half, I left inspired, more confident in myself and in what I want to do in the future. I am more sure than ever that politics are inside me because he saw it and recognized it in me. He oriented me on my major’s career outcomes, while telling me about his own experiences working in the public sector. Getting to know his journey as an academic, a researcher and a politician helped me decide on what I want to do.
These doubts concerning my future drove me to ask my history professor how I could start doing journalism as a post-grad profession. He told me he was a historian and still could write for a political magazine and even become its editor. He could still analyze in depth the American political landscape while teaching a class to 50 20-year-olds. It is he who encouraged me to continue writing for The Hatchet. Thanks to my American history professor, now I have “Nixon Agonistes” next on my reading list. Thanks to my Latin American political science instructor, I have a better idea of which master’s degree I want to choose, combining journalism, history and international affairs. Thanks to my political philosophy professor, I got to better understand how the American political system works, with all its beauty, complexities and incoherences.
Going to office hours opens the door to interpersonal knowledge. They are an attempt to see the human behind the academic and the student, foster dialogue outside the implicit hierarchy and distance that classrooms impose. As W.B. Yeats once said: “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.” That fire can only be lit if we dare to reach out, if we build relationships with our professors and aim for human connection more than for the absorption of raw knowledge. To do that, I have not yet found a more effective tool than GW’s office hours. I propose, therefore, to look at education as an encounter and a shared endeavor. As a possibility for human connection. Dare to try, go to office hours, and if you’re lucky, you’ll find a mentor that you will never forget in your life.
Santino Bernacchi, an exchange student from Sciences Po Paris majoring in social and political science, is an opinions writer.
