“I really very badly wanted to be an intelligent person,” said assistant professor of Philosophy Chauncey Maher during the Idea Fund’s Our Community, Their Ideas (OCTi) event on Friday, April 6.

Professor Maher shared his trials of going through college as an undergraduate and his thought process as he applied to doctoral programs.

“So I actually did get a PhD. So I’m successful,” Maher said. But what he shared next may be a little less expected.

“I didn’t feel intelligent,” he said. “The goals that we set for ourselves are not what we think they are going to be when we reach that goal.”

Maher’s talk represented his answer to the question, “how do we define success?”, which was the this year’s OCTi theme. OCTi arose out of an Idea Fund program, Our Professors Their Ideas, and is designed to bring people from across the Dickinson community together to share their ideas and experiences.

“I wanted everyone who comes to this event to open their mind to this idea” said Sam Bogan ’16, a member of the Idea Fund who helped organize the event. OCTi was inspired by TED, a global idea sharing conference. except instead of experts sharing their ideas on a topic, OCTi consists of both professors and students speaking on a common topic. “It’s not normally asked of people to speak outside of their specific titles,” Bogan explained. The event drew a small crowd to the Rector atrium, but still maintained an intimate and personal feel.

Poets from Dickinson’s spoken word group Exiled! Opened the event before Professor Maher took the stage to share his experience on success. Maher was followed by Rachel Williams ’16, who shared her fascination with plane crashes, explaining how they are often caused by a series of small things.

“If the worst tragedies are caused by smallest things, what is it that leads to the greatest success?” she asked. She discussed some of her failures before concluding, “Success is the ability to look failure in the eye and be proud of it.”

Professor Scott Boback of Biology then shared a story about his experience finding a Great Plains Narrow Mouth Toad in an area that the frog was not known to reside. Professor Boback recalled how this small event still resonates as great success to him because of a bigger idea behind the documentation of a frog’s location.

“If we don’t know something is there, how can we conserve it?” he asked.

The final speaker of the night was Evan Dubchansky ’14.

“Has anyone ever asked you to do something slowly?” he asked. He spoke of his experience at Dickinson and abroad, sharing the revelation he came to that he had more hours scheduled in his week than there were actually hours available. But while abroad, Dubchanky started keeping a journal, writing down three things that he did every day. He started looking for things to put in his journal as he went through his day, which encouraged him to enjoy time as it passed. “That time, the in between space in our small moments, is how I define success,” he concluded.

The event concluded with an open dialogue, where both speakers and the audience responded to questions about success and shared their experiences. Even after the event had concluded, a large part of the audience stuck around to continue the dialogue.

“I did not know any of the speakers before this and I found their thoughts very insightful,” Jackie Goodwin ’17 reflected after the event.