Originally written for byFaith Magazine. Derek Rishmawy is the Reformed University Fellowship campus minister at University of California Irvine and a PhD candidate at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He cohosts the Mere Fidelity podcast. You can follow him on X or read more at his blog.
On my first day of college, I showed up wearing a T-shirt and a black tie over it. Why? Because I thought it was a “move.” I was going to stand out and be the “t-shirt and tie” guy.
This cringe-worthy (and, thankfully, short-lived) moment in my college career reminds me of that well-known “Hamlet” line: “To thine own self be true.”
Funny enough, this statement comes in one of literature’s earliest recorded “going to college” speeches. Polonius is a windbag sending his son off to university with a bunch of basic advice, and toward the end he delivers the classic line with more context than we usually get: “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Polonius might be a bore, but he’s getting at perennial questions every college student begins to ask: Who am I? Who am I going to be? How will I be perceived by others? Without employing the modern language for it, he’s talking about the issue of identity.