New students: now that you are familiar with our recent past, it is up to you to decide our future. I cannot overstate how extraordinary that power is.

You walk into class for the first lecture and there are, literally, 300 students already sitting down. You find a seat towards the top of the lecture hall, and frantically attempt to write down every word your professor says as they jump right into the class material. Large lecture classes can be scary, but with the right strategies, you can make them feel small and be successful.

There’s no shortage of options for eating on campus. Yet, most students end up finding something they like the first week and sticking with it the entire year. Your first 30 days will be key in establishing useful habits, so here are some new things to try you might otherwise have missed.

I count some people I met during the first week among my closest friends, and I consider myself incredibly lucky to have met such a wide variety of people I can still wave to, even if our inseparability turned out to just be temporary. But it’s absolutely normal to realize you just might not be perfectly aligned with the very first people you met in college, and it’s really no big deal.

But what happens when Wikipedia becomes weaponized and used to advance an agenda rather than the truth? This is the question that author and WashU alum Stephen Harrison tackles in his debut novel “The Editors,” which comes out in August. 

“The Editors” by Stephen Harrison follows a collection of characters through the early days of the pandemic as they face the challenges of neutrally describing the changes happening to the world around them online. Student Life spoke with Harrison ahead of the novel’s August release.

For many incoming college students across the country, the image of the quintessential college experience includes some element of a sports game-day culture. If you ended up at WashU, that element most likely wasn’t a key component in your college decision.