ALUMNI love this place. They're itching to come back here whenever they can, and when you meet alumni outside of Charlottesville, they're always eager to talk about this school, the years that they spent here, and how it has or hasn't changed since they graduated.
This common adoration for the Grounds seems to be almost universal among University alumni, but I have become increasingly aware that the reasons for loving this place vary widely.
Last weekend, I was present for the 175th anniversary celebration of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society. Scores and scores of alumni came back to participate in the festivities, and there was plenty of feasting, drinking and toasting. For a few hours, we listened as one old guy after another shuffled up to the front of the group to talk about what the Society was like in his day, about the pranks he pulled off with his compatriots, about the group's long history of butting heads with University administrators.
This was no leisurely, Sunday-afternoon drive through their recollections of the University. They were drunk-driving down Memory Lane, pure and simple. Ordinarily respectable, peaceable adults -- many of whom had children, some of them in tow -- were shouting as raucously as any college student I've ever met.
Watching the alumni describe victories and defeats of long ago as though they had happened yesterday, it was clear that the time they spent as students in this organization had an effect on them. Many claimed that when they thought back on their time as students here, they thought first and foremost of their Friday nights in Jefferson Hall. One alumnus, a former Student Council President, said he was forced to pick between returning for his 30th class reunion in June or for the 175 celebration in July. He chose to come back to the student organization that mattered most to him: the group of friends he made in the Hall.
While I may be partial to this particular bunch of people, here at the University you will meet students who are equally passionate about every student organization imaginable. I don't mean to impugn the academic experience that lies ahead -- you could devote every waking moment of the next four years to classwork and still come nowhere near to covering even the tip of the iceberg of what's available to you. I merely mean to suggest that it is the people you'll meet that will make your stay here worthwhile. In all my time talking to students and alumni, I've never seen anyone get as passionate about an academic course as about friends and personal experiences.
To put it directly, people whom you have yet to meet will change the direction and tone of your life. Don't expect to be exactly the same person a year from now, and don't cling to the notion that the priorities, ambitions, and concerns that you harbor now will bear much resemblance to the way you'll eventually think as a job-saddled, tax-paying citizen.
With the hundreds of official student organizations on Grounds, and with the thousands more social relationships that will be available to you, the University offers an incredible range of possibilities. There's no harm in trying something that you have absolutely no reason to believe you'd be good at. You might not care for it, but then again you just might.
My own experience with Student Council might illustrate just how unpredictable these things can be. My first encounter with Council came as a second-year, when I wrote a scathing "news" article for a student publication about how the presiding officers were in dire straits when one of them was caught helping himself to funds belonging to the student body.
Having never bothered to attend a single Council meeting or to meet any of the officers, I opined that the whole damned thing should just be abolished. The article was published, and I continued to be righteously indignant until one of my friends, tired of hearing me rant and rave, pointed out that if I thought that I could do a better job than those clowns, I should stop talking and prove it.
Suddenly my jabbering ceased. This had never occurred to me before. I started to get involved and actually learn something about Student Council, and less than two years later, I now rather sheepishly preside over an organization that I formerly wanted to abolish. Life is not without its ironies.
You stand to learn much more in the coming years from your classmates than from your classes. When you're sitting in your dorm room this fall, thinking about how much you miss your parents or boyfriend or dog, or about how much harder classes are in college than they were in high school, or about how much you miss seeing people that aren't exactly your own age, please remember that it's not meant to be easy. College is difficult, even painful. But one day you'll be one of those gray-haired people who's forever making up excuses to contact their old classmates or come reunite with them in Charlottesville. And future students will watch your story-telling marathons with the same strange blend of admiration and incomprehension that I felt last weekend.
Welcome to the University, Class of 2004.
(Joe Bilby is president of Student Council.)
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