For just about any college student, summer is known and loved for its total lack of class and homework (summer students aside). However with the break comes a downside – a lack of school-related extracurricular activities. This editor found that the biggest gap in his summer came as a lack of opinion sharing.

University life is special in that you get months on end to interact with thousands of your peers. We are all roughly the same age; we share notes and borrow each other’s books. With the commotion that is the semi-nocturnal, highly caffeinated experience that defines an undergraduate life come the opinions. We trade news stories with friends and debate politics, economic policy, and whether or not tomatoes should be served on campus. Despite seeming like a homogeneous group of late teen and early twenty-somethings, varying only in school and major selection, we are all vastly different in our viewpoints.

Now that we are back to school, our immersion into the realm of Opiniondom starts up again. That’s what I have been missing all summer. A lot has happened over the past three months, yet most of the din of my peers’ conversations has gone unheard from my home in Pittsburgh. A gigantic oil spill, a landmark gay rights decision (albeit in a lower court), and an addition to the United States Supreme Court normally would cause quite the stir all over campus as every angle of the event is scrutinized in conversation, print, and on blogs. Except this didn’t happen, not during the summer.

Certainly major newspapers, television stations and blogs have covered these events in-depth, but as a Student Life opinion editor I want not only the opinions of mainstream journalists but also those of my peers. Let me expand this to include not only opinions on society and politics, but also on movies and music. What Roger Ebert says about the film “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is largely uninteresting to me. The movie was laden with video game and graphic novel references—ripe material for appreciation and criticism by college kids. Ebert is 68 and probably didn’t get anything the movie referenced. I’m waiting for our Cadenza review.

I not only miss our collective dialogue about life, the universe and everything that goes on at or around Wash. U. and the world, but also the opinions of our entire generation of college students. Reading our fellow universities’ newspapers gives a keen insight into what our nationwide peer group thinks and how it arrives at its opinions. The opinion sections of Texas A&M University’s The Battalion and Vasser College’s The Miscellany News will frequently yield diametrically opposing views on the hot topics du jour. Whoever may be right or wrong is irrelevant, it’s seeing how we as a generation, not just as Washington University students, are witnessing, processing, and forming opinions on society’s happenings.

Student Life’s back-to-school issue always takes on the topic of what we missed most during the summer. For me it was the banter, the ceaseless tug-of-war of debates that permeate college life. As we move back into our dorms and make the first of our biannual pilgrimages to the bookstore let’s take up words with and against our friends and fellows to tackle everything going on this side of the solar system. I certainly will.

Why? Because I missed our constant collegiate debate and the journalism that goes with it.