Thirty-two months. Thirty-two puny, vast, boring, fascinating, stagnant and transformative months. If you’re average, it will have taken you about 32 months at Binghamton University to earn your degree, and this time will account for approximately 13 percent of your life.
Tempting though it is to package up time in a neat little box, already this math becomes exclusionary. Maybe you’ll complete your degree in three years, or five; maybe you’ll finish at 24, or 44, or maybe you won’t finish at all. What’s fascinating to me about school is that though the circumstances that led to our arrivals might differ greatly, the 16,000 of us on campus each year navigate the same set of options with which we shape our college experience.
By options, I mean only that the same classes, majors, professors, schools and even extracurriculars are made available to each student. Yet how often do you hear liberal arts students lamenting the job security of the accounting program, or engineers envying the freedom of English majors? When it comes to college, the number of choices is so staggering that I feel like I’m shrinking if I stop to think about it. It’s not impossible that every interaction may have forked the path a little bit more, leaving an infinite number of other potentially fantastic or disastrous outcomes to evaporate unnoticed.
Usually, I’m distracted enough by all the ordinary “Binghamton-ness” we have in common to function properly — an overheard complaint about Pods space here, a loud sigh about campus construction there. But sometimes, glimpses of those other paths are visible. Stumbling across an exemplary student profile online, I’ll realize that the girl who ordered ahead of me at Jazzman’s is actively researching a cure for cancer or the guy who waited with me at the bus has already started his career at Apple. Did I miss some sort of collective group consensus that we’re now old enough to start kicking the world’s ass?
Recently, in a moment of similar anxiety, a friend mixed up two famous proverbs by saying, “You can lead a man to water, but you can’t teach him to fish.” Though accidental, his metaphor was actually pretty insightful. Whatever influences and preparations brought us here, learning “how to be” at college is a course in itself, one we have to figure out on our own. It took me a few years, but I eventually realized that each discarded path is a reality for someone somewhere. For every hopeful thought I’ve dismissed, someone out there has respected and acted on its parallel; now they’re in the positions I admire. And really, age has nothing to do with it. It seems almost silly not to try.
As the years go by, these 32 months will become an ever smaller percentage of my life, but I hope to retain the sense of possibility that embodies daily life at BU. I’m an art student, and I’m lucky to count future accountants, scholars, nurses, lawyers, teachers, engineers and entrepreneurs as friends. A love of photography brought me to Pipe Dream, where I met sports fanatics and programming geniuses, pop culture gurus and grammar snobs whom I might otherwise have had no occasion to know. By proximity, their experiences have been nearly as influential to me as my own, and I’m so grateful for the circumstances that caused our overlap.
It’s been four years since I joined Pipe Dream, and I almost scraped by without writing a single article. I’ve wanted to since arriving on campus, but something — being judged harshly on bad writing always seemed more likely than being judged harshly on a bad photo or a bad design — always held me back. Eight semesters later, this piece will be my first and only byline in the paper, so thank you for reading what has allowed me to realize one more potential path of my college career.
—Jules Forrest is a senior majoring in graphic design. She has served Pipe Dream as an assistant photo editor, photo editor and managing editor.