For two years I was the only member of my school's philosophy club who wasn't a senior. I went to every meeting. I said almost nothing.

This was not shyness. It was a deliberate decision, made after the second meeting, when I realized that I could either speak and be quickly identified as the sophomore who didn't know enough, or I could listen and learn the vocabulary of the conversation before trying to join it.

The club read Camus, Wittgenstein, Simone Weil. I read the same texts but also read about them — reading the secondary literature, the critiques, the responses. I kept a notebook of questions I wasn't ready to ask yet. By spring semester I had forty-three questions. I asked three of them.

The three questions changed the trajectory of three different meetings. Not because I was brilliant — I wasn't — but because I had waited long enough to ask the question that was actually at the center of the conversation rather than the one that was easiest to ask.

Waiting is not passive. It is a practice. It requires a tolerance for uncertainty, a resistance to the pressure to demonstrate your presence before your presence has substance. Most institutions reward the first person to speak. I've become interested in what gets said by the person who waits.

At Dartmouth, I want to study philosophy and cognitive science, specifically the epistemology of how we know when we know enough to act. It's the same question I was asking in that club. I just finally have the vocabulary to ask it properly.