ALU is a Farm, Not a Supermarket
A Note to Freshmen
by Ahmed Konneh, ALU ‘16
“The poorest way to face life is to face it as a sneer” — Theodore Roosevelt
Two years ago, I had a conversation with a fellow student who was leaving ALU. He was disappointed. According to him, he was sold the ‘wrong dream.’ Nothing in the school seemed to match up to his expectations. He had expected a ‘stable place but found a place struggling for survival’, he told me: The school has no history, no functional Alumni network, internships didn’t come easy. The Alumni network is not functional, yet. The food was not good enough. The students were not that ‘special’; only a handful are really ‘cool’. Most of them are “arrogant”. He didn’t ‘enjoy’ the learning model. Given the traditional school he came from, he found it extremely difficult to adjust. He struggled to work in teams, especially with people most of whom he found ‘unnecessarily assertive’ and ‘domineering’. His list was endless! Soon enough, this coupled with homesickness and loneliness caused him to start hating Mauritius.
Clearly, the vision was not working for this student and he was not ready to make it work. And while I didn’t necessarily agree with his conclusion, I understood his sentiments.
I went through a similar experience during my first year. The marketing team had done a good job in putting me under an optical illusion. Photoshop and well-doctored images created a world that did not exist. But if we’re being honest, the ALU Marketing team did what any world-class marketing team or even Silicon Valley startup would do. I know this because I run a startup myself and many startups around the world have some ethical problems. They would sell anything to you. Like politicians, they would sometimes ‘build bridges where there are no rivers’. They would ‘literary sell ice in winter, water to a well, and fire to hell’, like Jay Z. You can’t blame them for that; the goal of every marketing is to sell, no matter the quality of the product. Just sell! Remember Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Wolf of Wall Street?
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not implying that ALC is not a quality place. Infact, I wouldn’t have the skills to pen this piece down had it not been for the quality education the school provides. However, I’m only saying that marketing teams often over-exaggerate the quality of things so that they can be bought, sometimes to the detriment of every brand they are marketing. If you don’t believe me, ask the author Ryan Holiday why he left marketing before becoming an accomplished writer and thought leader.
But isn’t that what they say about ‘appearance’ being different from ‘reality’? So to take at face value and swallow up everything a salesperson gives you is to set yourself up for disillusionment. This is what happened I experienced three years ago during my first year.
Like my friend who could not manage his expectations and left the school, I expected a flawless package when I left home to join the school partly because of the way it was presented to me. But when I hit the ground and saw the reality, I was a bit disappointed. Not that the school was not a good place to be but that I had expected so much more. My initial reaction was to withdraw and figure out my life first. Did I make the right choice? Am I still ready to spend four years at a place that is changing every day? Should I go back home, continue my study at a local university and run the venture I co-founded? In this process of uncertainty, of trying to figure things out, I was swallowed in an archipelago of depression. I barely attended classes and when I did, I was not interested in most of the class activities. I would be in class in person but never in spirit. The classroom felt like a jail to me (still do sometimes but for different reasons); I was drained emotionally by just being in class. And for no obvious reason, I hated the experientials (one component of the learning model). I’m sure some of my facilitators and peers reading this piece noticed. Worse, I allowed myself to develop an abhorrence for other students and what I saw at that time as their obnoxious attitudes in class. I couldn’t stand them.
While I’m usually not a big fan of outdoor activities, my withdrawal prevented me from enjoying all the good things the school had to offer. No! I was too bent on the problems to enjoy the opportunities. I was barely seen in social gatherings and other important institutional events (Still struggling with this one). As others were experimenting, exploring and growing, I was wallowing in my disappointment, self-absorption and misery. All because of the little things! And before I realized, my first year was gone and I had not really grown as much as I would have had I indulged myself in the different school offerings.
Haunted by that realization, I made a decision to hold myself individually responsible for every aspect of my education and growth. I took control of my experience and got more involved in designing it. I signed up all the programs I thought would enhance my growth. I applied for the RA program and became one. I tested the different support systems and got some good results. Instead of competitors, I started seeing every student as a partner and co-creator of my journey and treated them as such. My network skyrocketed. While ALU tries to support us in many ways possible, I made a decision to expect more from myself and little as much as possible from the school. Few months after I did this, I began to see everything good in the school, everything I had taken for granted. The school itself. The beautiful students. The generous staff. The incredible support systems. The rich culture and the opportunity to create one. By choosing to see these positives and reaching out for them whenever I needed, I changed not only my outlook on the school, but it also allowed me to recognize my role in shaping it.
I used to think of ALU as a supermarket where I can just pop in to pick up things but I realized it is a farm where you reap what you sow. You plant, fertilize what you plant and watch it grow before you reap. Often, we just expect things to be given to us as students without putting in the necessary work and efforts. I don’t really know how the internship program works — I had the opportunity to go back home and run my start-up. But I often wonder why is it possible for some students to get 3–4 internship offers while others have none? Two things come to my mind: either the system is rigged in favour of the so-called ‘cool kids’ or most of us are really not applying ourselves that much. I’m assuming without admitting that while the former is possible, the latter is often the case. And I believe ALU has a part in this. From what I have observed so far, the school has positioned itself more like a mother who mollycoddled her kids, not a father who tries to toughen them up for the cold world outside the mother’s warmth clutch. And this has made many of us entitled ‘brats’, people who don’t only think the world revolves around their needs but also people who are not supposed to struggle, at all.
We want a wholesome university experience without experiencing the pains and struggles that come with it. We want to ‘be cool’ without doing anything ‘cool’. Instead of asking what I need to do to make ALU better, we find comfort in criticizing the school for everything it is doing wrong. Some of us have completely given up on the dream even before we played our part. The number of talented students who seem to have withdrawn from owning the vision is shocking. I know because I was once in that camp. And “there is nothing quite tragic as a young cynic.”
Maya Angelou once said, “because the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.” No matter what ALU struggles to make right, you will never believe it. For you, it’s all show, pretence and the heartless pursuits of money at your expense.
Many years will pass before ALU is developed into a deep sea of higher learning and culture. But I believe this will only happen when all of us holds our end of the bargain and excels as it is expected of us. We must cycle the wagon, love and represent the values the school espouses. Like one of my mentors put it: ‘you don’t love your mother because she’s Mckinsey certified as the best’. You love her because she is simply your own.
From the aspiring academics in the community and budding entrepreneurs to the artists, programmers, athletes and fashionistas, I believe the responsibility rests on the shoulders of every one of us to be the perfection and excellence we demand of our school. I know that so many things have changed about the school but so have its students. I believe the initial vision remains the same — -preparing young African leaders to drive prosperity on the continent. I think we have every right to criticize ALU for ‘not living up to some of its expectations but we must never allow ourselves to be crippled by its shortcomings. We must struggle to make it better, every day.
I’ve come to realize that a school will only be as good as the quality of students enrolled in it.
We make the school as much as it makes us.
Think about that as you start your journey, new students.
Lest I forget, welcome to ALU!
Ahmed Konneh is a final year student at ALC Mauritius and a co-founder at SMART Liberia. He is also a Goalkeeper at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Mo Ibrahim Generation Now Leader. He blogs at www.ahmedkonneh.com and tweets at @AhmedKKonneh
