Welcome to Bobby's World

Author: Bobby Joe Smith

Well, in less than three weeks it will be the end of the semester, and the end of my first year here at Middlebury. What will I have to show for it? To be honest, I don't really remember it, and I was sober the entire time. Just yesterday, on my daily walk to the library, I stumbled across three trees and a stone monument that for some reason I hadn't noticed before. It feels as if just last week I was moving into my room, foolishly deciding to loft my bed and buying posters to fill up the cement walls that were as bare as the insides of my new mini-fridge. I was full of hope for the future; a young aspiring college student thirsting to acquire the tools necessary to take on the world, one textbook at a time. The world was my oyster, so my mom had told me, and I was off to a prestigious private college on the East coast. Then, somewhere between the frequent all-nighters, Moby Dick, laundry and weekends spent in the computer lab trying to write various programs that make dogs jump through flaming hoops and bounce balls into cups, seven months had passed by. And now here I am with three weeks left of school, sitting atop my loft, drooping my head down slightly to keep from crashing through the drywall ceiling, trying to remember if I made the most of my first-year experience. Am I any better than I was when I first arrived? Was my $42,000 (soon to be $45,000) investment a smart one?

The truth is, I just don't know. How could I? How could anyone accurately assess their collegiate value? Last I checked, there wasn't any particular formula measuring its efficiency or profitability. If there were, picking a major would be a lot easier. Would you grade your career at Middlebury in terms of cumulative GPA? Or does your personal GPA depend on the career you receive after Middlebury? Does one measure himself by the amount of clubs, services and extra-curricular activities he can put on his transcript? Or is the most important number the amount of friends and wallposts you have on your facebook account? Perhaps it's a combination of all the above.

Your experience here at Middlebury goes fast, just ask the seniors (those that are writing their theses) how fast it all goes by before they are being booted out of the Middlebury bubble and into the real world, into the rest of their lives. If you're not careful, the onslaught of papers, books, labs, problem sets, workbooks and projects can have you drifting from deadline to deadline until… well, you're dead. Now let me make it clear that I am in no way encouraging people to drop their text books and go running through the forests as naked as the day they were born trying to finally experience life. Work and due dates are just a part of life that we're all going to have to deal with, that's just the way our society works. All I am saying is take the time every once in a while to look up from your textbooks and Soak in the world around you. Instead of just reading about life, live it. After all we're in Middlebury Vermont, and when farmer Brown isn't applying fresh manure to the fields around us, it's a pretty nice place to be.