College Life: Wordsworth and Wolfe (9.29.2005)

For as long as I can remember, the last place I wanted to go to college was UT. I wanted to go somewhere where the trip home would take longer than five minutes and the student body was not the size of a city. Most of the schools I applied to were the opposite of UT: small, liberal arts colleges in an idealistic natural setting. I would picture myself studying on greens or having late night conversations in courtyards similar to “an actual grove of academe through which scholars young and old might take contemplative strolls” (355). When it came time to make the decision of where I would enroll in the fall, however, I could not get UT off my mind. Generations of my family have attended this school and the programs I had been admitted to were among some of the best in the country. The other schools I visited didn’t feel right. The architecture was too ugly or pompous, the weather too cold or the student body too introverted. Unlike the UT campus, the other campuses didn’t feel like my place. Now that I’m here, I, like many students at Dupont, realize that UT’s atmosphere called me to the school. I felt a pride for the place I would be attending, similar to many of my classmates who “…knew the feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of life—yet nobody had ever captured that feeling in words” (356). When my puzzled friends would inquisitively ask why I chose UT over schools in Chicago, Connecticut and Boston, I couldn’t explain. I had simply found a place where I felt a passion and motivation. I, like Charlotte, desperately wanted to leave my high school world. I loved my friends and my memories but there were too many pre-conceptions, evident in just about everyone’s expectation that I would leave the state of Texas and never return. It took a lot of effort to break out of those predictions by realizing that “all that was something happening up-hollow in the mountains at dusk as the shadows closed in, something already done and over with” (363). Eventually, I found my inner comfort and determination; I was excited to go to UT.

My first days at UT, however, were not what I expected. While I had realized that “there might be entering freshmen who already…had friends”, I never realized how hard it would be to make new friends (367). I, like Charlotte, was ready to make new friends, to move away from high school. With time, this became easier, and I made incredible friends, but, as always, change was hard.

My first weeks of college have also, like they did for Wordsworth, taught me the importance of a balance between reflection and socialization. Like Wordsworth, “Oft when the dazzling show no longer new had ceased to dazzle, offtimes did I quit my comrades, leave the crowd, buildings and groves, and as I paced alone the level fields far from those lovely sights and sounds sublime with which I had been conversant, the mind drooped not; but there into herself returning, with prompt rebound seemed fresh as heretofore” (374). I often feel the need to be alone, to think without noise and glances cluttering my thoughts. When I have had this relief, however, I find myself even more ready for the constant interaction of college, an interaction that years from now will bring back memories of when my classmates and I “talked unprofitable talk at morning hours; drifted about along the streets and walks, read lazily in trivial books” (376).