Post Graduate Study.

Four years of study - but what next? Where may the newly graduated alumnus occupy, and at the same time improve himself? After graduation there is a great deal of time left in the lives of most men which must be filled up in some way by all, and with an idea to pecuniary profit at least by most. How shall this be done?

It is not at all unlikely that many of the freshmen who have just entered college are thinking how much more they will know four years hence than they know now, and how much better able they will be to study and conduct original investigation, and how much bigger men they will be in every way. Of all these things, it is to be hoped they will not be disappointed, that in a certain degree we believe they will not. But at the end there are two things of importance to be avoided, the danger of self-satisfaction, that is, of conceit for too much wisdom, and the danger of losing by neglect all that has actually been gained. The former danger is, the writer believes, the lesser. Four years at a college of any spirit at all are quite likely to take a large portion of a man's conceit out of him. Some men require the whole four years for the renovating process; and some men even require more. But the truth is that a large number of men have at graduation only just subjected themselves sufficiently to be able to study in the right spirit, in the realization of their own ignorance. This humbling men is a great benefit of a college course. Another benefit is that it teaches men how to study properly. It is strange to some, perhaps, for anyone to say that many students on entering college do not know how to study properly. But certain it is that many graduates have declared that only when they were graduated did they begin to know the true art of study, and how to use it. If, then, two of the most important lessons of life are not learned by college men until the close of their senior year, it must follow that some schooling in the art of study, so newly learned, when it can be attended by a humility so newly attained, is most desirable and likely to be most beneficial. A lesson is never really inculcated in the mind until some experience in its principles has been had.

The two above mentioned dangers of self-satisfaction and of mental backsliding are not, it is true, very great for those intending to study in any of the professions, law, medicine, or ministry, or even for those who aim to an active business life, or at teaching. The prospective professional men will find a continued mental activity in their professional schools, the business men in their counting-houses, and the teachers in their school rooms. But they are not all the men that a college graduates. Where are those who intend being higher than mere teachers, who aim at professorships? And where are those who look to neither law, nor medicine, nor ministry, nor business, nor instruction? For them the postgraduate course is of inestimable value.

There is no need of speaking of the value of such a course to men intending to make of themselves professors. And, indeed, after what has been said, it is hardly necessary to speak of its value to that other class of graduates, the men of leisure. We have seen that a college teaches its students how to be humble and how to study. The added application to study, then, of a postgraduate course broadens very effectually a man's views and inculcates in him an aptitude for study and learning, of which his four years at college had given him only an inkling. No one who would be a wise man and a knowing one, will be satisfied with this mere inkling. He will strive rather to get the benefit of the two great lessons which he had learned in his college course by taking a post-graduate course. He will see the value of post-graduate study and will apply himself to it.

Finally, let everyone realize that at the age of graduation from college the mind rests easily and can ill afford to be neglected, and that if no immediate activity of mind, in study for a profession, or in teaching, or in business, is looked forward to, it is far better and it will promote profit and pleasure, present and future, to adopt some definite and of course some interesting line of study.