If you have an ability, you want to exercise it, not anesthetize it.

Some parents let kids "learn on their own skin" and many of those kids end up, as adults, languishing on their parents' sofas.

I believe that a core problem with undergraduate education, especially at research universities like Harvard, Stanford, NYU, etc, is that most teaching is done by PhDs, who by temperament, training, interests, and rewards are researchers first. So they spend most of their time and energy probing a snip of a field's cutting edge. In my view, the attributes needed to be a transformative undergraduate instructor are pretty orthogonal to that. It would seem that undergraduate education would be superior if there was a separate track for teaching faculty.

When you're going to school primarily for career purposes, it's more important to focus on which program is best for you. In addition, your success at college depends far more on what you do at the college than at which college you do it: Choosing the right program, then the right advisor, the right courses, the right term papers, the right co-curricular activities, the right fieldwork, the right internships. You can make those choices at any college.

I believe the personal essay is underrated for both writer and reader. It affords the writer great freedom: to speak personally yet invoke others' ideas, to be rational and/or emotional, to be confident or admit doubt.

Some people who are recovering from depression want to use the lessons they're learned in coping with depression and their empathy for people with depression. Others want their career to have nothing to do with depression.

As a writer, you have control: You can play around with your own thoughts and when you find those insufficient, draw upon others': their wisdom, their humor, their failings.