Life Skills

There is a refrain about the education system everyone will recognize: that schools don’t teach

“life skills” and that classrooms should have taught people how to do their taxes before teaching them trigonometry. To be fair, I have never once used trigonometry in my daily life, but that is completely missing the point of education as a force for the enrichment of life. The kernel of truth these jokes do hold, however, is that many students leave higher education with specialized knowledge of a chosen field yet a concerning lack of life skills. I am one of these students.

This is where I am thankful for the Fellows program. So far this year, I’ve caught up on life skills I had never learned before, like making decisions regarding auto maintenance or learning how to cook (actual) food on my own. Because of the community I live in, I am not facing these problems alone. I have a housemate whose knowledge of cars helped me understand when I need to get new tires, and he even changed my oil. (Thanks Jackson!) In the kitchen there are other housemates with more knowledge of what makes food work than I have, helping me understand that I should not have put the full pound of pasta into the small pot I was using. (Sorry for delaying house dinner!)

The “real world” that people warned us about is a whole lot less scary when you have people in the same stage of life to face it with. Not only is the world less scary, but it is much more fun, more full of joy and levity when you have people to grow alongside.

There are many problems each of us in the program face that no one else does, but quite a few are shared. Having people to share these problems with, to laugh about them with, takes a bunch of the worry out of this volatile period of life. I know, living in this house with these people around me, that if I am ever facing a problem that I do not know how to handle, there are people ready and willing to help. I could not ask for a better space to grow in this new season of my life.

-Written by Brooks Townsend, Class of 2026

Brooks attended Calvin University and is working at Land & Sea as a Pittsburgh Fellow.