On campus

This afternoon finds me on the campus of a major research university, utterly on my own whilst Mary and Two engage in activities that mothers and daughters consider essential and fathers find excruciatingly boring. Accordingly, I have temporarily but firmly severed ties with wife and daughter in favor of finding my own entertainment.

Yes, I’ve gone noticing. Big surprise, right?

The venue for my current observational adventure is the first floor main lobby of the campus student center. This being roughly lunchtime and having established my ‘blind’ on a well-upholstered couch smack dab in the center of the space, I am vastly entertained by the constant ebb and flow of student life.

This is at once an alien and homey experience for me. Alien because having never had the ‘university experience’ and - no matter how I try - missing by a country mile in my attempt to get inside their minds,  I can never really ‘get’ them. Homey because in any large group of people, acting generally in concert toward similar but highly individual goals, the motivations and worries and fears and joys are mostly the same. People want to fit in, want to get their work done well, need to feel connected while independent, crave what they crave and are repulsed by whatever grosses them out (okay, so the Venn diagrams don’t entirely overlap on that one, so what?).

The young woman in the chair next to me happily agreed to watch my stuff while I went around the corner to get a hot chocolate but I have the sense that her watchfulness was not entirely necessary. No one seems much worried about walking away from their nests for ten minutes at a time to buy food, engage another group, visit the necessary, whatever. Still, I asked and she agreed to be vigilant on my behalf. It was a neighborly moment.

But I digress…

What is constantly amazing to me is not how smart these young’uns are in the academic sense. They were chosen to come here at least in large part on the basis of a demonstrated ability to learn. So no big shock that most of them will survive the rigors to spit out the other end with degree in hand.

What bogs my noggin is their seemingly effortless ability to project manage all the various activities of their lives. The kid over there selling calendars for charity gave his senior capstone presentation yesterday and will be singing in a concert tomorrow evening.  And while sitting at the table, he’s planning an outing with a group of friends. I know all this because he’s a buddy of Two’s with whom I chatted last night and because I am a reasonably accomplished eavesdropper.

All around me, students are talking about classes, finals, assignments of course, but also myriad activities, organized and un- (dis-?) and it amazes me that they keep it all straight. I’ve looked at the syllabi and assignment schedules for some of the class sections here and the weight of just the required elements of three to five courses would seem staggering. And they do occasionally stagger, to be sure. But they muddle through somehow, and they do so while piling on clubs, campus jobs (Two is a campus tour guide), excursions, charitable activities, friends needing shoulders to cry on, laundry, medical problems, and for some, True Love.

I know this level of engagement is not unique to the students at this particular institution because the same was true for the students at One’s college, on the other side of the country and in a wildly different set of majors.

I’m not qualified to judge whether these kids are being well-prepared to become engineers or physicists or cognitive scientists. But I suspect they’re being pretty well prepared for the ever-changing and frequently competing pressures of life.