Alyssa GregoryWhen I was asked to write this column, I was basically told to slap down some canned nostalgia about sunrises on the steps of Brookings or sex in notable places. Well, I saw my sunrise in the Quad, but only because I was too much of a wimp to kiss the girl, and I prolonged the date way too long. You can probably guess about the sex.
To be nostalgic would be misleading. Maybe it’s because I only graduated eight months ago, or maybe it’s because I work at WU now and spend more time on campus than ever. Maybe it’s because the only memory that accurately summarizes all four years is “foot-long meatball on wheat.”
No, nostalgia seems like a defeat-like I’d be saying that the best thing I took from WU are a bunch of memories. I do have some great memories from WU, but I have great memories from a lot of places. For example, this one time in high school, I put the wrong soap in the dishwasher and flooded our kitchen with bubbles. That’s a solid memory.
I choose not to look at WU as something that happened, but something that’s happening. Right now, I’ve got WU-minted friends and enemies all over the U.S. and several foreign countries. On an almost daily basis, I talk to people doing everything from waiting tables in a yellow-walled restaurant, to waiting tables at the art museum. Pretty much anywhere I go I have a friend to stay and play with.
At WU, we lived in a tightly controlled social environment which was mostly contained by maybe three square miles of St. Louis. And, although we all entered with essentially the same academic backgrounds and (though Bush doesn’t seem to care) largely the same social backgrounds, by senior year we became frat boys, athletes, architects, doctors. We narrowed our interests to fit first into a school, then a couple majors, and finally a thesis. We allowed our social network to contract until we were surrounded by enough familiar faces to think we knew everyone on campus.
We complained of too much work, too few bars, too little dating. We allowed ourselves to be pigeonholed into a major, into a group of friends, and into a single lunch item. Some of us were to be artists, or engineers, or professional liberals, and some made it to the next round on good looks alone.
Then came senior week-the week when you’ll get on a bus for pub night and realize that not only do you not know anyone on the bus, but you’ve never seen them before.
Senior week is a mind-altering experience. With your whole class together for the first time since orientation, you’ll see friendships play out in ways you never predicted. Your friends, it turns out, have other friends. Some you know, but others you’ve never heard of. Underlying all those social networks we tried so hard to build were arbitrary connections made on freshmen floors, in subway lines, and in distribution requirement classes.
During senior week you’ll rewrite much of your undergraduate experience. You’ll decide not to take the advertising job and instead audition for comedy. You’ll dump your boyfriend, you’ll make new friends and abandon old ones. You’ll realize that the rest-of-your-life is not simply the logical conclusion to college.
I guess, when it comes down to it, this whole column was just a gumpian riff. The real world, to college’s meatball sub, is a box of chocolates.
Brian Hamman was the editor in chief of Student Life in 2000-01. He currently works at Washington University.