Bates Student: Forum: My kind of success

- September 18, 1998

My kind of success

By MEREDITH RICE
Staff Writer

Settling into the Bates experience, fresh off the boat from Texas, I look around anxiously for some sign of a dramatic revelation. After all, this is college! I've made it! All of those tedious years before have led up to this moment. So where are the life-changing realizations? Where is that overwhelming feeling of something new and great? It has quickly become evident to me, that there will be no striking wave of emotional thought. The nostalgia of my childhood is not melting away to give room for the mysterious nuances undoubtedly hovering in my future.

I cannot feel old, nor can I feel young. Not that I ever could, really. People say college is the best time you'll ever have: that thrilling synapse in life when everything is laid out on the table awaiting curious discovery. And each one of us might find something different, they say, but the journey will be the same. *The journey is everything.* And as all long, difficult journeys begin with a single step, I think college is just one more step moving us down our individual paths to that light at the end of the tunnel. It's all we can do, as scared kids in a new place, to hope that that light doesn't just lead us to another tunnel. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But that's not where I am right now, so I don't care. Right now, I'm busy performing an evolutionary juggling act with Plato in one hand and an apple juice box in the other.

See, I think college is actually more extension that transformation. An extension of my knowledge. An extension of my experience. An extension of myself. And any transformation that occurs within happens because that change has been screaming to come out and only now has found its voice. It was the me I'd always wanted to be. As time has progressed, I feel I know less and less of who I really am. Perhaps that is because I'm discovering more and more. Maybe that's why I really came here. Why did you?

The one certainty I do know is that college is a breeding ground for learning. Whether it be the philosophy of Aristotle or the influence of my own inner strength. College is chicken soup for the mind. That

is why I can feel okay about writing these personal thoughts, knowing they will be in the newspaper, knowing my words will open me to the scrutiny of my peers. A breakthrough. Breakdown? Breakthrough.

So as we find ourselves free-falling into the abyss of the excitingly unknown, I think to myself, "Fall. Fall and see where it takes you. It just might be a better place than the point of which you jumped off." And maybe that's what college is all about. A journey into both the internal and the external of ourselves. A not-so-subtle way to discover who we really are. And that great moment of awesome realization comes not when we arrive, but when we take flight. Then again, I could be wrong. I am just a freshman.

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