If you have never asked yourself this question, then I would venture that you are in the minority of current college students. Most people, including myself, have wondered (and stressed) about why they are here, what they are “supposed” to be doing, and how to just get by. I think the answers to all three of these questions are fundamentally similar—they all speak to the search for personal meaning.

We are trying to get the most out of our college experience; we appreciate how lucky we are to have this rare educational opportunity, and we don’t want to squander it. All too often, when we are not enjoying our classes, having trouble with friends, or generally lacking the will to continue fighting the good fight, we fall into a rut that is very difficult to crawl out of. So what can we do when the only things keeping us company are negative thoughts and an ever-increasing pile of homework? What can we focus on to make our situation a little more bearable?

My answer to this last question will undoubtedly fail to satisfy everyone. I do not underestimate the range of difficulties students are coping with, and I do not presume to understand their predicaments. All I can offer is a thought that has (usually) kept me going when I seriously ask myself what I am getting out of my college experience.

This idea has a bit of a back story, so bear with me just a little:

Spinoza, a 17th century Dutch rationalist philosopher, wrote a philosophical treatise, Ethics, that was meant, as he put it, “to provide a coherent picture of reality and to comprehend the meaning of an ethical life.” The text systematically examines God, nature, emotion, human interactions, and ultimately freedom—not a small endeavor to say the least.

One of the central doctrines that emerges from Spinoza’s Ethics is the notion that there exist three progressive forms of knowledge: imagination, reason, and intuition. Imagination, the lowest kind of knowledge, is a reasonless association between things, for instance, knowing that when a plus sign is placed between a 2 and a 3, the sum must be 5. The second level, reason, is a complete understanding of the complex mathematical principles that contribute to a plus sign having the logical property of addition. The third and highest form of knowledge, intuition, is one’s ability to apply the reason-based principles of one subject, which were rationally developed and understood, to other subjects without going through the steps of reasoning out the answer. Spinoza’s intuition may be thought of as converting a deep rational understanding of a thing into a kind of instinct that we may trust due to its logical underpinnings.

So, how do Spinoza’s three types of knowledge relate to the question, “What am I doing in college?”

This is how I see it: we are here to cultivate our intuition. (If you are groaning at the simplicity or perhaps naivety of this answer, see my disclaimer at the beginning of this column—I recognize that this idea may not resonate with everyone). We are here to take in and learn from every experience that comes our way, be it exciting or banal.

We begin in the imagination stage of knowledge, and our college experience, or education, more broadly allows us (hopefully) to move through the reason phase and ultimately into intuition. So when we ask ourselves why we are here, it may be helpful to look at the details of our day-to-day lives, our studies, and our relationships to glean whatever learning we can from them. The understandings we internalize now will undoubtedly serve us in the future. We should view every situation as an opportunity for growth, whether it happens now or is geared toward our lives in the “real world,” so that we may both see worth in the mundane and strive toward greater and greater challenges.