Volume CXXXII, Number 2 September 20, 2002 f

Living the best years of our lives
LARA JACOBS
COLUMNIST

Anytime I expressed dissatisfaction with aspects of high school, adults always responded, "Just wait till college." Then you will be living the "best years of your life." By the time I arrived at the polar bear statue guarding Smith Union, my expectations of Bowdoin and of myself were overpowering. Meeting best friends for life in the first two days, attending mind-expanding lectures on the Middle East, trying crew (not usually an option in landlocked Colorado), and writing for the Orient all fought for precedence in my thoughts, along with the more personal expectations to be more outgoing, to try something scary each day, to "fit in" to the microcosm known as the East Coast.

After a week of speeches inspiring first-years to "take advantage" of everything Bowdoin offers and not live a life of "what ifs," during which my advisor, Mary Hunter, asked what I feared most about college, all of the expectations, speeches and activity fairs boiled over into a tangible fear of missing something. I explained to her that my goal for college was to "do everything." Luckily for me, Professor Hunter had much more sense than I, and simply said, "You won't. You can't possibly do everything"-at the end of your four years there will always be that philosophy class you wish you hadn't missed, or that sky-diving club you wish you had tried.

Later, while reading the 75 emails from all forty-five clubs I signed up for at the activities fair, I appreciated for the first time how limited these four years are, and realized that college is a reckoning of sorts-a coming to terms with who you are versus who you expected yourself to be. Through many trials and many more errors, I've realized that "being more outgoing" means meeting five new people today, not joining the debate team; that crossing the country to go to a college where I didn't know anyone means that I'm lucky if I do one familiar thing each day in the midst of twenty-five that are new and scary; that it does take time to adjust to a place where it seems the majority of the student body is "from right outside of Boston" and Wal-Mart is the exciting activity of choice for a Saturday afternoon (a little much for a girl from Boulder, Colorado).

Thus, I attend activity meetings, until I have such a plethora of handouts they could last as fuel for a month, to find what I really want to be a part of. I get up my courage and question upperclassmen at the library to find out which classes will make me question the way I look at the world. I meet at least 100 people to find seven close friends. The world may be my oyster, but it's still my job to crack open the shell to find the pearl.

In addition to helping me redefine my goals, Professor Hunter left me with one more piece of advice: "embrace the monkey wrench."

Throughout your time in college, embrace the class outside your major that makes you seriously question and rethink what you want to do with your life. Embrace the friend that comes from a different political or religious background than you do and thus questions or disproves your assumptions. Embrace the moment of recognition when it dawns on you that even though you've taken French for the past six years of your life, you're ready to try something new. Embrace that which will potentially alter your carefully planned path to who you thought you were and where you thought you were going.

For me, this has meant taking classes on symphonies and on Dante's Divine Comedy, discovering I love the ocean as much as the mountains, replacing the fiction next to my bed with biographies of Dante and studies of Florence-and my CD player now holds Beethoven's 9th instead of U2. Nevertheless, embracing monkey wrenches not only encompasses welcoming the new parts of myself, but also accepting what's already here-I'm not a soccer player or rower; I'd rather change the status quo through an editorial than an election.

The point is that I am no longer waiting for college, I'm here. And Bowdoin, just like most things in life, is what I make of it. This process of self-discovery, of replacing expectations of situations and of myself with the reality of who I am and what I enjoy doing just might make these next four years the best of my life.