Back To School

I'm not a mom, and I haven't been a student for years.

So I guess in some ways, I owe my job for letting me hang on to a feeling I always kind of liked - that "back to school" feeling. I was one of those students who always adored it - the coming of fall, the buying of school clothes and supplies, the meeting new classmates and teachers and finding out what my next year or term's classes would be like. That hopeful sense September brought of starting something new and exciting began for me in middle school and carried through college.

In college, there were always at least two starts a year, in fall and spring. But somehow, that "back to schoolness" never carried over into the beginning of the spring term. It was tied to September the way Christmas is to December or Halloween is to October, at least in my head.

When you work in a college, you still get that feeling, even if you don't have children of your own and you aren't slinging a backpack over your shoulder yourself. Campus is often seriously quiet in the summer. Sure, we offer classes. But it isn't a regular term, so instead of having thousands of students milling about there a just a few hundred spread out over the day. On a decent-sized campus, that can feel like a ghost town sometimes.

There's a downside to this for the worker-bees. In the summer, people can be late to work and still grab a primo parking space. Forget that in the fall. At lunchtime in the summer months, you can go to a food vendor and grab a slice of something without waiting in a line of more than two or three people. In the fall, you start remembering to pack a lunch again, because if not you'll spend your whole break in a line.

But for the most part, the good outweighs the bad. You can't help but be energized in that sea of new faces, most of them there in search of ideas and dreams. The hopefulness, nervousness, excitedness and promise seem to permeate the air you're breathing sometimes.

This year is a little different. In the past, at least part of my job has involved working directly with students. I've been in the role of advisor, helping them select the best courses for their situation, and an administrator who helped them resolve more bureaucratic problems. So during the first two weeks of school, those hopeful and sometimes frustrated faces were standing in my office doorway, day-in and day-out, nonstop. It was often overwhelming, but there was nothing better than having someone come in frustrated and close to tears because of some annoying circumstance that new students face, and having them leave reassured and ready to focus on new courses and new friends and all the things college SHOULD be about.

This year, I'm removed from all that, because the project is too intense to spare me for any of the customer service work. Most of the time I'm glad of that. But this time of year, I get a little twang of regret about not being in the thick of things.

Still, when I walk across campus for meetings or to check in with the "home office," I am surrounded by the newness. A girl who looks about 14 but MUST be college-age timidly asks me where a certain lecture hall is, clutching her schedule in her hand like a lifeline.  A guy in a baseball cap who looks like he just got out of bed but is practically bouncing on the balls of his feet anyway wants to know how to get to Financial Aid. And on it goes as I make my way through surroundings that are so familiar to me I could navigate them in my sleep, but to these newcomers are confusing and strange.

I was 26 when I started working at the college - just a few years older than the seniors and younger than many of the non-traditional and grad students. Now, at 38, I could easily be the mother of any of the freshmen and sophomores. Back then, I blended into the crowd and most took me for a student myself (of course, back then we also had a very lax dress code too!). Now, I look like someone who knows what's up. They just know I either work somewhere on the campus, or maybe think I'm a professor.

It's weird.

My friend Sully is off work this week. We became friends back in college, and he stills holds a nostalgic love for the place. To me, campus has become "work." - that's one of the downsides to getting a job where you went to school. To him, it is where we grew up and had more fun and adventure and mischief than we ever would again. He comes up to campus to grab a coffee and soaks in that feeling, and as I meet him for a quick break and we sit outside and drink our javas, I look at the students milling by and wonder which of them are at that very moment walking with a new friend who will become their "Sully," someone who will still be a brother-like friend when they are creeping up on 40 and have been through jobs and marriage and children and possibly divorce or other hard luck, or maybe amazing good fortune.

Then I notice that almost all of them are talking on cells or texting as they walk. And I realize that unlike Sully and I, they will never know a college experience where most students didn't have access to this kind of instantaneous conversation with EVERYONE. They will never know college without the internet and texting and cells and IM.

And in some ways, I think they're incredibly lucky to live in this age where they set foot on campus having already had so much information and communication at their fingertips. I think they are light years ahead of where I started.

But another part of me feels bad for them. At 18, they already have the shackles of instant communication that make it so easy for your life to be one of constant distraction and interruption and to-do's. That comes with the territory of being a grownup, and will happen to them out of necessity soon enough. I hope that having it now doesn't mean they won't experience those long hours I did of reading fiction with a small circle of classmates by a pond, focusing on nothing but the books in our hands and the blades of grass under our butts and the sun in the sky, because the outside world couldn't touch us until we got home to our voicemails. I hope it doesn't mean they won't spend hours and hours talking in the campus coffee shop or at the pub with that classmate who will become an amazing friend, so focused on each other's thoughts and experiences that everything else fades for just a while. Can people still do that when their phones vibrate with a new text every 5 minutes?

Back to school makes me think about everything, in a circular but somehow hopeful way. I love it.