My university’s campus is stunningly beautiful. Sprawling, huge green oaks line the roads that run alongside unique and interesting buildings housing both the students and the academic disciplines, offices, and classrooms. The place that I eat food every day is a large, circular room of enormous glass windows that open onto my dorm’s quad as well as a long stone pathway lined with the same amazing oak trees.
As much as I appreciate the beauty, and can describe it to a prospective student or curious family member when necessary, I sometimes reflect on how much I take this campus for granted.
I’m nearing the end of my sophomore year, which means that my time at this place is halfway over. I often find myself – especially on clear, blue-skied, sunny 70-degree days like today – walking through campus and having moments in which I think, “Damn, that building is pretty,” or “If I was visiting campus for the first time right now I would fall in love,” or “Man, I should’ve paid more attention to the beauty of this place when I first came here.” Because the reality is that when I first arrived on campus as a senior in high school visiting the universities that accepted me, I was still upset and hung up on being rejected by my dream school. I had resigned myself to going to the huge state school that was my back-up, and didn’t even consider my current university. My mother forced me to come for the admitted student day, and even after I had a bad experience (because of my own negativity, not because of the people I met or the meetings I attended), she persuaded me to choose to come here.
I love my university. It took me over a year – at some point in the middle of last semester I had the epiphany – to realize that it’s a great place and that I’m actually incredibly happy to be here. I love my friends, my professors, my classes, my dormitory, my roommate, and my life here. I’m incredibly saddened when I think about my future of not being here anymore.
And I wish with all my heart that I could go back to that first moment when my parents drove me around campus in our rental car and my mother was ooh-ing and aah-ing at all of the buildings around us. I wish that I could join her in absorbing that beauty and taking it in for the first time – because I know so well that having your breath taken away the first time you view something amazing is simply the best feeling.
It’s a sad reality that I know I cannot go back to that moment. But I know that one day far, far down the road, I’ll return to this place as an aged alumni. And hopefully at that time I can have the feeling second-best after the one of initial viewing: returning to a place where you loved, laughed, and lived, and perhaps then I can really appreciate my beautiful university.
melrlite 