You’re back. Welcome home. We’ve missed you. The dorm halls and library alcoves have been quiet and dusty for too long. Glenn G. Bartle Library, Lecture Hall 1 and The Rathskeller are finally filling up again with hungry students. Young people like you and me, looking to explore, to change and to leave our mark.
Now that the first week of classes has ended, summer tans from long days on Jones Beach and the Hamptons are slowly fading back into the Binghamton blues. But it need not be so; grab yourself while you still can and shake.
It’s true. It is definitely time to get down to business. Time to start actually looking at some syllabi and maybe even printing out some documents from Blackboard. But no matter what, don’t fall into a meaningless routine of wake up, class, homework, weekend, party, repeat.
Hurricane Irene (remember that?) may not have affected us in Binghamton, but routine will kill you. Routine will take all of what college is supposed to be about — learning, changing, growing — and turn it into memorizing, procrastinating and slacking by.
Fight this. Dare to live on purpose and approach everything you do with your full self.
You’re obviously reading Pipe Dream right now so I’m going to infer that it’s highly probable that you read the last issue of the year in May, when the departing senior writers all had their last hurrah. Freshmen, sorry, you can imagine, but keep reading. This is especially for you.
Those pieces provided incredible insight. Imagine being able to look into the mind of someone in your shoes, four years down the road. What advice would a more experienced you want to share with a current you?
Not so amazingly, each senior says essentially the same thing: the real meaning of college does not come as much from academic courses as it does from your relationships and pursuits outside the classroom. They all say this because it’s true.
Binghamton has an incredible plethora of opportunities to get involved, whether it’s in a team sport or a musical, a social group or even a particular academic subject. College is all about casting your net out as wide as you can — you should feel your shoulders crack — and finding that one thing that makes you feel like time goes too quickly when you’re doing it.
It is incumbent upon us to heed their advice. Only through our efforts will the sagacious words of those who came before us not be in vain. Just this past Friday night, a friend and alumnus back for the weekend made me swear I would do everything I could to take advantage of my time here while I still have it. We should all have that attitude. To not appreciate what we’ve got until we’ve lost it is the most painful malady of the human condition, but there is a remedy.
Slow down. Catch up with yourself. Take a look around. Think about the fact that an overwhelming parentage of the world today would give anything to be in your position, on the brink of adulthood with endless possibilities to learn and grow.
Consider what you’re doing here. The most important questions you struggle with in college will not appear on a Scantron. Remember that real meaning can never be measured in credits or letters but is found in relationships and the connections you make here.
Let’s hit this year hard. Make it count.