At this point, I judge the people waiting in line for Subway at 1:05 p.m., and I will send hostile vibes your way if you answer your cell phone on the third floor of the library. Nineteen body shots is excessive, and I have no sympathy for the Facebook friends who send me too many group invitations.

You see, I am now an upperclassman, with all the hard-earned wisdom of age at my disposal. After four semesters at Washington University, I am no longer presumed naïve. In fact, when my friends and I walked onto campus for the first time this semester, it was our turn to cast benevolent smiles at the freshman who asked us for directions and to shake our heads at their innocence.
“They just seem so young,” we said, passing a clump in the DUC.  “They’re so obvious.”

My arrogance dissolved, of course, when I confused Cupples I for Cupples II and showed up frazzled to my first 400-level class. Fortunately, I had also misread my schedule and had a solid 30-minute wait to get over the embarrassment before it actually started.
The thing is, I’m not the first to rant about look-alike buildings with the same names, and I’m sure if I looked hard, I could find someone else willing to admit to their incompetence at navigating them. I may very well be rationalizing, but I don’t think I’m alone in making freshman mistakes as a non-freshman.

Of course we grow between the beginning of our undergraduate education and the end, and of course we learn a lot along the way. What I’m wondering, however, is why this seeming gulf between freshman and senior year is a divide that keeps us from interacting? If we’re still not the dignified students we imagine ourselves to be, why do we feel the need to disdain those who are less so? This actual and perceived distance between the grades is artificial, and it keeps us from developing the relationships we could really use.
Once new students get involved—say, in Greek life or Student Union—they start to meet the older grades. Residential Advisors and WUSAs interact with their residents, and there are plenty of formal peer mentoring programs that gear up after the year starts.  However, outside of these formal programs, there doesn’t seem to be a casual way for the classes to connect. And if I’ve learned anything at Wash. U., it’s that the casual advice, the kind you don’t even know you need, is often also the most valuable. I’ve taken enough classes with the wrong professors and declared one too many ill-considered minors to know.

There’s a reason they replaced the Peer Advisor program of my (oh so long ago) freshman year, but there are different systems that work for other schools. Some have students fill out forms matching them with an older peer before they even arrive, like a high school Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. Some have mentoring systems within a major—a good way to keep students engaged with both a department and campus life.

Before a University program can work, however, we need to be more open to developing these mentoring relationships on our own. While being a junior or a senior does not guarantee that a person can pass along solid advice, and it definitely doesn’t qualify her as an expert, there is something to be said for experience—no matter how many mistakes we’re still making.

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Tags: grades

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Forum, Staff Columnists. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.