No longer the new kids on the block

I had always considered my 18th birthday to be an important date. I was actually, legally, formally going to be recognized as an adult, capable of making her own decisions. I was leaving my childhood behind, and coincidentally, also receiving my admissions decision from Columbia at approximately 4:00 a.m. So much for a birthday present, huh?

Strangely enough, I find myself musing that leaving freshman year behind is somehow equivalent to leaving 17 years of childhood behind. No more shall that glorious feeling of being new be extended to us. Last year, and even this semester, we have the privilege of saying that we’re undecided as to our major. But by the end of next year, we will all be finalizing our career paths.

We will be deciding our place in society, in the larger world we live in as engineers, economists, scientists, and teachers and so on. We will be stepping up to bigger responsibilities, again. It’s empowering to think that there is going to be a whole host of incoming people who will look up to us for wisdom and support for their first year here.

We’re not going to be the babies of the institution anymore.

Today, it’s been exactly 364 days since my life changed. For some reason, it seems to me that I grew up faster in the last one year alone than I did in all the 18 years before that. At some level, I think, the fact that I’m a student at Columbia University still hasn’t yet been completely absorbed.

Sometimes, I get so caught up with midterms and assignments and so on, that I forget that I’m in an environment that many others are putting in an enormous effort to be a part of. It’s as if I’m too worried about how many more problems/pages to finish or how to shore up the grade in each subject to absorb the full impact of what it means to be here at Columbia, in New York.

Even when we’re working hard, or wondering if we belong here, or if this really what we want to mold our lives into, we need to sit back and tell ourselves what we would tell our seniors.

Congratulations, we’re at Columbia.