New student arrival day has always been my favorite day of the academic year.
Even before the first ridiculously overloaded car rolls up to a residence hall, the campus is buzzing with energy and anticipation. Dozens of RAs and orientation leaders in matching t-shirts enthusiastically greet new students and eagerly haul armloads of suitcases and boxes and bedding up crowded staircases. Facilities and residential life staff fly around campus in golf carts racing to replace a missing window screen or deliver a new key for one that doesn’t work.
A cacophony of hip-hop, classic rock, and pop music echoes down hallways and across campus quadrangles. Wide-eyed new students make awkward conversation with roommates they’re just meeting while entourages of parents and siblings busy themselves making up beds, assembling hastily purchased plastic shelves, cramming plugs into power strips, and stocking mini-fridges with Gatorade and orange juice.
Presidents and deans give welcome speeches rich with lofty notions of academe, institutional ideals, and campus traditions while reassuring anxious students and their families that they are ready for what lies ahead. A few faculty members, administrators, and staff dutifully mill around receptions featuring trays of cookies and brownies, and iced tea and lemonade that tastes like the coffee that was previously served from the same dispensers. And students and their families smile and make small talk as they brace themselves for the impending moment of goodbye.
The whole day is exquisite – exciting and terrifying and exhilarating and awful and wonderful all at the same time. But it is all those things because the first day of college is a big deal. Most students recognize arriving at college as the culmination of thirteen years of school and what has become an incredibly onerous college admissions process. And they are aware that in some important way it is the end of childhood, that the academic journey they are beginning will be different and more challenging than high school, and that they will be more independent than ever before. But until the first day actually comes those ideas are only abstract daydreams.
When you’re 18 and starting college there is no way to fully grasp the enormity of the moment until you are consumed by it. There is no way to know what it will be like to navigate the stairways and halls and shared bathrooms of a residence hall – or what it will feel like to lie in a strange bed across the room from a person you barely know, waiting for sleep to come that first night. There is no way to know which of the other new students trying to stuff too many belongings into too few drawers may turn out to be your friend or bug the crap out of you or become a love interest. There’s no way to know who you’ll go to dinner with – or what you will eat. And there is no way to know that from the moment you step into your room you will wish your family could both go home and never leave at the same time – or that after they do go the lump in your throat will disappear and everything will get a bit easier.
For students the first day is hectic and overwhelming and time seems somehow to simultaneously fly by and stand still. One minute they’re standing in line waiting to pick up their room key sipping bad coffee and eating dry mini muffins, the next they’re cramming into the chapel or gym or auditorium listening to welcome speeches, and then they’re hugging their parents goodbye and fighting back tears. And after dinner they find themselves doing silly icebreakers – tangled in a human knot, laughing and shouting with ten perfect strangers – and reveling in the inexplicable joy and comfort that it brings.
In the moment, everything happens so fast that it doesn’t dawn on most students that this particular day will be burned into their memory – however imperfectly – for all time. It will be a moment etched in time. And in the years that follow, they will recognize their first day at college as the dividing line between everything that happened before and the lifetime of possibilities that followed.
I admit that I am prone to romanticize the first day, and I know well that for many students and families the challenges it presents diminish the sense of joy and accomplishment that is most commonly associated with this particular milestone. But the first college day is a monumental occasion even for those for whom it is a moment to be endured rather than memorialized. Because in the end, starting college is much more than a temporary change of address, a few new friends, and muddling through a few required courses as you figure out what to major in. Starting college is a gateway to new ideas and new ways of engaging with the world and the first glimpse at the person you will ultimately become. And those are things that should be elevated and idealized.
So, I wish you well as you break out the school colors, don your name tags, and unfurl the “Welcome” banner on your campus. Enjoy the best day of the year – and all the rest that follow it. Cheers!