Still Growing

There's a reason why the Spiderman franchise has been rebooted three times in the last 15 years.  Yes, corporate politics are involved, but think about the point in the story we always come back to.  Everyone knows the origin of Spiderman, and yet the franchise always kicks off with Peter Parker's transformation into a superhero.  Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland, we start with a young man who must learn how to use his powers and, to a larger extent, about his place in the world.  The first movie in the series is almost always the best because origin stories are easy:  the whole world is new to the hero and the path to growth is straightforward and well defined.  Subsequent films struggle because there are fewer obvious paths toward character development, and without growth, the story gets boring.

This anecdote was very much on my mind in the beginning days of Stanford@SEA.  Having previously done Stanford@SEA in 2017 as a student and returned this year as a TA, I felt like I had already lived out my exciting origin days and had landed myself in a dull sequel.  I grew a lot during the last Stanford@SEA simply by virtue of being thrown into an entirely new environment.  I had to learn to adapt to constantly changing levels of responsibility, to manage the logistics of hourly deadlines, and to rely on my watch mates to accomplish complex tasks using our combined memories.  All these new experiences and demands meant that no conscious effort was required on my part to grow.

Joining the Robert C. Seamans in 2019, though, I felt stagnated.  Everything that was going to happen in the next five weeks, I'd already done.  Sure, I could learn more about sailing, because there's always more to learn about sailing, but I'd already crossed the arc of personal development that the SEA program leads students through.  Staying at the end of that path didn't sit well with me.  So few people have the privilege of experiencing something as incredible as Stanford@SEA once in their lifetime-let alone twice-and I couldn't stand the thought of coming out this time the same as I'd been before.

I really didn't expect my time as a TA to lead to much growth:  TA-dom is not a new role for me and it wasn't a leadership position like being on SEA staff.  However, the emphasis on increasing responsibility for students in SEA has taught me something extremely valuable:  how to act when it's not about me.  The second phase of SEA, which we just completed, involves the students learning to take the responsibility of running lab and deck.
Students have to learn to start thinking about everything that needs to happen on watch so they can become a watch officer in the third phase of the program.

One of the most exciting parts about coming back to the Seamans was being able to use everything I had learned two years ago.  I derived a tremendous amount of satisfaction from being able to immediately go to the appropriate lines when it was time to set or strike a sail.  This was helpful in the first week when students were still gaining their sea legs.  Past this point, though, it became inhibitory.  If I raced off to the correct line any time we went to sail handle, the students would never have the opportunity to take the initiative and figure things out for themselves.  This trip is their experience, and it's more important that they learn the leadership and self-assurance that comes from puzzling through a task than it is for me to feel proud of myself for two minutes.

In the past month, I've learned a lot about putting the group's needs above my own.  I've had to think hard about how I naturally react to certain situations and whether that reaction will benefit the students' experience.
It's a mindset that I've never had to sustain for long periods of time before.  I've spent the majority of my life as a student, where the focus was on me and how my needs could be met so I could better learn.  Even as a captain of a dance team, my needs were still at least at medium priority because I had to go out and dance like everyone else.  On the Seamans, I'm no longer front and center.  I'm not even on the stage.

Learning how to take a back seat wasn't initially enjoyable, but it's given me a deeper feeling of satisfaction in the way I conduct myself.  I feel like I'm becoming a more mature person in a way I didn't two years ago, and I'm still growing in ways I never could have imagined even in the early days of our voyage. 

After I leave Stanford in December, I will enter a world where nine times out of ten, it's not about me.  Further, I plan to join a line of work-marine conservation-where it's especially not about me.  I've started learning a mentality that I can take forward and use to be a better teacher and more effective coordinator.  Hopefully, I can continue to grow in this direction.

-Emma