The sun is beating down on my face. I stagger to my feet, my head throbbing, and walk the seemingly infinite stretch of hallway to the bathroom. A rush of cold water on my face and I’m finally awake, half a bottle of Advil away from being a functional human being.
There’s an impressive round of recycling to be done, but in the meantime I’ll busy myself with some Aristotle. The room is stained with the distinct odors of foam and barley. Welcome to college, first-year.
College life: high school seniors discuss it with tones of hushed excitement. It is a place where all of their wildest party experiences can be enacted on a weekly basis, a place where they can liberate themselves from everything that held them back in high school and and even a place to slay many a Natty in the process.
What can get lost to people during these wide-eyed reveries is the fundamental goal of a college campus: to learn something from these experiences, from these freedoms.
Whitman has endeared itself to me over the past two weeks in a way that has wholly satisfied my expectations, and certainly validated my decision to come here. What I have found here is a campus and community where academic and personal liberation can truly exist in a way that is remarkably similar to the stereotypes young people associate with college.
People playing Frisbee out on a beautiful grass field, students longboarding to class, biking out to town, reading “The Odyssey” by sunlight, every beautiful collegiate stereotype plays itself out before my eyes.
The word stereotype typically is embedded with negative connotations, but here that’s not the case. These stereotypes-turned-realities are rather the built-up ideals every young mind has accrued when they set off for college with high expectations.
Classes are characterized by lively discussion, professors speak with a kind of passion for their subject matched only by their intimate knowledge of it and it’s hard not to share in that passion.
Whether it’s a class effort to discover the chief good in life or a small group sharing poetry and short stories, Whitman professors catalyze discussion that keeps students engaged in the subject.
Academically stimulating days give way to nights where you can dance in foam, play midnight Frisbee, and watch a sketch comedy show, all in one night. Of all I have seen here these past few weeks, nothing has impressed me more than this pairing of academics and community.
Whitman truly is a place where anybody can find a niche, where anybody can fit in and excel, where basketball players go to philosophy with debaters and where musicians can party with actors.
Most everyone has read on The Princeton Review that Whitman students are consistently ranked in the top 20 “happiest” students among colleges nationwide. Coming to Whitman, I wasn’t entirely sure how these kinds of rankings could be made: what makes a person happy? How can you tell?
Having lived here for two weeks now, though, what doubts I had about these rankings have been dispelled entirely. The feeling of Whitman is one of contentment and comfort, a feeling to which I can now easily relate.
