Taking College by Degree

It was a 1,000-degree day in Philadelphia last week when I realized that I am not a new college student anymore. My family and I were moving my younger sister, the fourth kid and the last of the dynasty, into college for the first time. Unlike most normal students first arriving at college, Kid Number Four knew that move-in is not about finding oneself or making first impressions or creating a new identity. Instead, it is about one thing: schlepping. More specifically, it is about schlepping large and unwieldy boxes filled with what couldn't possibly be anything other than a collection of spare bricks up four flights of broken stairs in 1,000-degree heat.

After a student mistook me for one of the move-in parents, I decided that I was getting a bit old for this routine and my other sister and I decided to wander down to another first-year dorm to visit the room where she had spent her own first year of college.

Two bedazzled and saucer-eyed members of the Class of 2002 were parked in her old room, accompanied by their equally bedazzled and saucer-eyed parents. My sister explained that she had lived in that room seven years ago, and the students asked her how she had liked her first year. She replied that it was wonderful, the best year of college, and that the two of them had a lot to look forward to. As we retreated to our box-schlepping fate, I asked her whether she had really meant it. I was somewhat surprised when she said yes, until she explained why. "During your first year of college, you're surrounded by all these incredibly cool people and cool things," she said. "You don't realize until much later that most of them aren't quite as cool as you thought they were."

A rather depressing thought for our own incoming students, isn't it? Yet I imagine that more than a few sophomores, juniors and seniors would agree with it, at least to some extent. Only the most obnoxious of first-year students actually arrive at college with no enthusiasm for meeting and greeting their peers. Most race around trying desperately to meet as many people as possible, as if college were ending tomorrow and they feared missing any opportunity to connect with their future soulmates or to make a name for themselves on campus or to take advantage of every single resource the university might offer them. Those who were uncomfortable with themselves during high school seize the chance to remake themselves, introducing to others a person whom even they do not really know yet. Of course, all of this makes for incredibly entertaining gossip among roommates at three in the morning, as well as hours of fun playing the Facebook Game two years later, when you count the number of people you've met on each page. The only problem with the new students' rampant enthusiasm is that it goes completely unchecked. Unlike in the real world, where throwing together 1,600 hundred strangers might create a somewhat suspicious environment (as in a stadium or a public beach or a prison), at college there is no second-guessing.

During my own first year, a girl named Janice George introduced herself to many of my classmates as yet another member of the Class of 1999. Telling people that she disliked her roommates and thus preferred to spend time in other peoples' rooms, she attended classes and made friends just like everyone else. Two weeks into the semester, a few of her new friends went to the room that she had claimed was hers to find that no one there had ever heard of her. Neither had the University Registrar. When word got back to Janice that the jig was up, she skipped town. To my knowledge, she never resurfaced.

Janice George, or, more accurately, the imposter formerly known as Janice George, committed no crime other than misleading people, something that even heads of state are known to do on occasion. But what became nothing more than a funny story among the incoming class probably should have been a warning. The truth was that Janice George wasn't the only person in the Class of 1999 pretending to be something she wasn't. Plenty of people were, maybe even most--at least from time to time. Bombarded by more than a thousand brand-new faces, we sometimes expected more from our new friends than we probably should have, and they probably expected more from us.

During my first year of college, I could have named over 50 people I counted among my friends. Now that I am entering my final year, I might put that number at around 10. It's not that my first-year buddies suddenly turned out to be evil impostors who spent all of their free time pretending to be Harvard students. It's just that, like many new students, I thought that my peers were what the college brochure claimed they were: "[my] greatest resources."

I sometimes thought my fellow students at college were like courses or library books, placed here for me as experiences waiting to be experienced, instead of what they really were--people who are important to each other because of the things they share, not because of the things that make them different and diverse and new and exciting. Like most first-years, I didn't always remember to take my time, or to do things because they moved my heart instead of because they were here and they were new. Luckily, I made it through my first year without any emotional avalanches. But I probably could have benefited from knowing what took me three more years to learn: the temptation during the first year of college is to do everything, but a little bit of everything is more or less the same as a whole lot of nothing.

The most meaningful things in college, and in life, are not the many things one tries, but the few things one chooses. If you are just starting college, or even if you aren't, don't let your vision be clouded by the piles of posters and hundreds of new faces. Ask yourself what you really want, take your time, hesitate before committing yourself to too many people or too many things, and don't be afraid to say no when you make a choice. Then, when you schlep the box with your Freshman Facebook in it out of your room one 1,000-degree day in June when you leave college for the last time, you'll look at that book and smile.

Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column will appear bi-weekly.