What I've Learned: Steven Powers

Steven Powers is a 20 year old philosophy major at Southwestern University.

From 2008 to 2010 Powers attended Austin Community College. This fall Powers was awarded a Score scholarship, a full ride that is awarded to a serious, upper-level philosophy student by the philosophy department at Southwestern University. Powers is the first transfer student to ever be awarded the scholarship.

I've been a philosophy major since I was 12.

I read a book by myself when I was 12, and I realized I could self educate. It was the most liberating feeling I ever had. I still remember very clearly when I had that book, which was Camus' "The Plague." I read the first lines of it outside my house and I clutched it. I held it tight to my chest and I ran home to my room so I could devour it without spectators.

Nobody in my family went to college. Most of them didn't get out of high school.

I want to figure myself out. I want to know who I am. But the pragmatic answer is I want to eventually be a professor.

I have no financial support whatsoever from my parents because they don't have any financial support for themselves. I got a lot of money from the government because of our income, which is basically zero, and my dad being a veteran and disabled. But I still had to work full time here so I could live and pay rent. I worked 40 to 50 hours a week at Café Medici on top of school. I slept in intervals of three hours throughout the day and the night.

My family didn't understand why one would read. They were even almost a little bit against it. They thought it was something bad or that it was going to teach me to be this liberal, this communist. They were not a fan of that. They wanted me to work, and they wanted me to make money and not waste my time.

There's been times where I wanted to just drop out and go home and work and be there with them, but I was advised by, not only Mathew Daude Laurents and Charlotte Gullick, but by my father even who said ‘the best thing you can do for our family is to be successful in this which you want. That's what we want for you.'

Mathew Daude Laurents was the chair of philosophy at ACC. I knew by the third class of his logic class, and then in ancient philosophy, that he was going to be a mentor to me.

Mathew taught me that resilience and stubbornness is going to make you a philosopher not some divine right to be so.

My least favorite memories are of classes with teachers who didn't know what they were doing, had not much of a trajectory, and didn't care about the students.

Be stubborn and if you have a poor professor, then do well in contempt.

Philosophy is a bit like a wife, and the mistress is literature who I keep good relations with just in case.

Nietzsche is the philosopher of the trenches. He is the one that has advised me so much in the way I have constructed my life and my trajectory. It is the same themes of make yourself uncomfortable, be that tight rope walker. Blessed is he who sleeps in the bed of a volcano.

It is a really great irony, no? It is only when you realize that you will die soon, if you live in front of that mirror that way, then you will live.