There’s a strange sense of irony staring me in the face as I sit down to write this article. The freshman edition which you’re currently reading is the exact thing that led me to the doorstep of The Daily Campus. It was my second Sunday at Storrs, and a long path would follow towards eventually becoming the editor of this section.
Now, on the other side of the glass, in the spirit of this edition, I pull from my past year as a freshman to offer you a story hopefully helpful to truly understanding the “point” of this time in your life that often people don’t seem to realize: We are here to find ourselves, review, reflect and reassert time after time who we are in a completely new way.
The best metaphor I could use to describe the first year at college is that it’s kind of like playing darts. Now, I’m quite bad at darts, so my goal when playing is to just let it fly and see what sticks. This is also the mentality I had going into last year. UConn is a very large place with opportunities in every direction: social, athletic, artistic, professional and more.
So, go out and try a million things, do a club sport you’ve never played, join the skydiving club, take a class on something random, be in a play, write your thoughts in a newspaper (seriously though, join The Daily Campus) or literally anything else that’s out there. When an opportunity is in front of you, do it. Let it fly, see what sticks to you, what gets you fired up, feeling passionate or losing sleep. If you try and lose interest in 99 different things, but find one that you truly love, you’ll have gained infinitely more than if you never did anything in the first place.
The reason is that a college education happens equally, if not more, outside of the classroom than within it. The point of a college degree is not just to get good grades, complete your major and leave. We are here to grow through experience, and I don’t mean the stereotypical “college experience” that usually comes through in movies and TV. Instead, college is about growing through the relationships we build, the communities we join, and the ways we give back to the campus. All these different experiences and attempts at something new teach us something about ourselves, our values, our interests and most importantly, our future.
This is important, because during this time, we are gradually deciding what we want to be, and I’m not just referring to what job we want to get post-graduation. What kind of person do we want to be? What kind of friend? What do we believe in? What do we care about? Every decision and every experience, the things we follow and the things we don’t, are decisions about the person we want to become, and all the different aspects that make them up.
For most of our childhood, we are constrained by ideas of who we are and specific cultural values that inform us about who we should become in the future. Whether that is because we’ve only lived in one place our entire lives, had specific relationships that defined our socialization for long periods of time, never experienced much cultural diversity or any other number of reasons, the point stands that now these ties that have bound us to the person that we are no longer hold their weight. There is an entirely new world standing in front of the incoming class, and nothing is holding them back. The direction that they go from there is up to them, but consciously or unconsciously, they will decide on one.
So, my point is not to urge people to change, to completely switch up their personalities and become unrecognizable when they eventually return home, but rather to be cognizant of this process. Maybe this university will only help uphold some of the beliefs you already have; it probably won’t, but either way, it would be a shame to not even be thinking about that at all.
To go through all four years here, and especially this first year, without at all thinking about what’s in front of you and critically analyzing how the things you’ve seen have shaped you and challenged you, would be a great disservice to yourself as a person and a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of your time here. It’s okay to wander, to not know exactly the destination that this time in your life will lead you to, so long as you engage yourself with this new world of ideas meaningfully all along the way.