8 September, 1998

Scholastic

I sat in sweltering classrooms last week after a grueling trek up to the campus. Swift walk to the Metro station, hot, crowded shuttle ride, scoot to class quickly to arrive in time. It was both exciting and mind-numbingly over-whelming all at the same time.

As I left class each evening, the campus was abuzz with life. Boys kicking soccer balls around the quad, co-ed teams of ultimate frisbee dashing around. In front of every class building, a cluster of young people talking and smoking, waving their cigarettes animatedly. I'd forgotten about the smell of cigarette smoke at the base of class building stairs.

And they all seem so ... young. I may only be a few years older than most of them, but somehow thse two years of being out in the "Real World" have made a change in the way I view age, has changed my perspective on maturity. The girls are almost all, invariably clad in bell-bottomy jeans and clingy little baby-tees, except for a few token earthy-crunchies and some of the foreign students who are still wearing "native" clothing.

It's very very different from Smith. This is isn't exactly a problem but it does require some mental gymnastics on my part. I'm used to people showing up for class in pajamas you see. Of course, many of the folk in my classes are dressed in business casual or formal because they also work full-time, like me. However this makes me feel like I stick out like a sore thumb. So today I have re-adopted my college-days uniform: baggy short sleeve shirt and jeans with sneaks.

My backpack has been resurrected along with a new binder, index cards and sticky notes for marking up my books without underlining. The bookstore was a zoo as usual and so much larger than Smith's. Daunting almost.

Can I say it enough times? This is very different from my undergraduate experience. I'm not so sure about this whole thing anymore. Because I came to the realization, as I sat waiting for the shuttle at 8pm on Thursday evening last week, that what I was looking for was a re-creation of that undergraduate experience, or at least, a close approximation. This is, in no way even close.

So I find myself reexamining my motivations as I desperately try to stay on top of the stack of reading which I had to complete for this week. I'm still not done. And my questions rise like a swarm of bees: can I really pull this off and still have a roof over my head?