ABSTRACT
I was an undergraduate woman at Barnard College just before the student revolt of 1968 across the street at Columbia. I lived in a delicate balance between wanting to explore and needing to succeed. This tension was expressed in the conflict between studying a wide range of academic disciplines and selecting only those courses in which I expected to excel. On a deeper level the tension represented the competing pulls of dependency and autonomy, of security and competence-an issue that women characteristically resolve later than men. Continuous evaluation created an atmosphere of vulnerability, which Jules Henry (1966) identifies as a major characteristic of our educational system. For me education was compelling and inviting but also fraught with the danger of failure. Exceptionally self-confident students transcended this atmosphere. They released themselves from the grip of grades and chose to follow their intellectual
curiosity. Some found ways to manipulate the educational system while reaping its benefits. I fell in the latter category and survived the college years by pitting my strengths against the system's design or matching my wits with the college's de mands. A useful asset was my ability to become interested in nearly anything; the college's weak point was its definition of success as superior graded performance in a major area. To be come less vulnerable, I had merely to select one area and per form well. Of course, the price paid was premature speciali zation, which could develop into incompetence in all but one field.
