Photo courtesy of Conn College Archives
After a day of hiding indoors from the crowds of prospective students at Connecticut College’s fall open house, I went to the second floor of Cro with my roommate and our friends. We sat, heads bowed over our books, brows furrowed in concentration, pens tapping notebook paper while we searched for the right word. My neighbor’s face looked ghostly and serious in the blue glow of his computer screen. Then his expression melted into a smile.
“I really love Family Guy,” he said. The girl next to him looked up from her highlighting.
“You need to do work,” she laughed, shaking her head at the cartoon playing on his computer. “I’m tired of looking up and seeing foolish things on your screen. I don’t know if you realize this, but you’re in college.”
In the past six weeks, I’ve experienced my fair share of college clichés: I became familiar with Thirsty Thursdays, received much-appreciated care packages from home and watched our dorm room assume the obligatory trappings of Christmas lights, a coffee machine, and a Salvador Dali poster. All of these hackneyed experiences gave me the assurance that I was doing something right; in the uncertainty and newness of my first month at Conn, these were the scenes of college life I had come to know and expect as a college-bound high school senior.
Even as we sat in our study group, writing papers and studying for midterms, I felt as if I were posing for a glossy Connecticut College brochure.
But even Animal House and that season of Boy Meets World when Cory and Topanga go to college together don’t really communicate what college really is; it’s something that you have to experience first-hand. Seeing prospective students shuffling from info session to tour to info session, with parents and admissions goody bags in hand, I remembered wandering the campus in their shoes. Now that Conn and I are on a first-syllable basis, I wonder what it looks like to curious strangers. The school invests a lot of money and manpower in creating an image for prospective students: putting together, among other things, a website, a tour schedule and an open house to draw in applicants. I decided to find out for myself what prospies see when they look at Conn.
I was ill-prepared for the flood of memories that following a tour brought back: the politics of holding doors open for fellow tour-takers, the intensely curious glances at passing students, the waning interest after thirty minutes or so. The parents interrogated the cheerful tour guide about extracurricular, study abroad and internship opportunities. The students asked about the food, the dorms and the social life. The tour guide talked at length about CELS, CISLA and CAT, as well as study abroad programs. The focus seems to be not only on the many programs that are unique to Connecticut College, but the fact that the education you earn here will equip you with the skills to succeed in the real world.
I remember thinking when I toured last year that it seemed I was about to make a fundamental departure from life as I knew it, that I would arrive at college and magically grow up. As I sat in an assembly and listened to a panel of eloquent students who looked like they stepped out of a J. Crew catalog rattle off their many achievements and self-designed majors and minors, I tried to picture myself among them, proudly describing my plan to double major in neuroscience and the history of basket weaving.
As a prospective student, college felt like the final frontier. I had spent the better part of my short life preparing to decide where to go to college and now, I believed, I was ready to be molded into an adult by the professors and students on the stage before me.
But sitting in Cro, trying to concentrate on my textbook while my neighbor laughs at cartoon violence, I realize that we are not adults. And college is certainly not the final step, but the first of many steps along the way to growing up. And while I take my time over the next four years pondering what it might be like to pay my own cell phone bill and not receive cookies from my mom in the mail, I can at least enjoy the knowledge that when a tour passes by me as I diligently type on Facebook, they might mistake me for an adult. I’ll just have to fake it ‘til I make it.
