With more than 2,000 freshmen, transfer students, and graduate students moving in this weekend, there will be more than 2,000 move-in experiences. Some of you will quickly realize that you can’t help but notice that your walls are made of misplaced cinder blocks, or that the single rickety stove pales in contrast to the dorm with its sparkling clean kitchens on every floor. The humidity of August without air conditioning (though the weather seems much more pleasant this year than it was during my own move-in in prehistoric times) might have you taking shower after shower for fear that your “Welcome Weekend” t-shirt might be damaged after yet another day of wearing it.
Some of you have dreamed of this campus your entire life, like a friend of mine who has lived and breathed Notre Dame his entire life and can breathlessly recite monologues from “Rudy” for minutes at a time. Others will see “Rudy” on the football field for the first time in a week, like me. Some of you will graduate without seeing the scene where Rudy gets on the bus to Notre Dame after his father begs him not to. Some of you will walk onto that same football field to graduate without ever having seen it. That’s okay—you don’t have to read every assigned text.
So much awaits you in South Bend (or the census-zoned property directly above it where these three facilities are located), and you’ll find that much of it doesn’t happen in class. How engaging is a curriculum when the conversation in your dorm hallway is heading into fourth period and, even though your eyelids have grown heavy, you have no desire to return to your room? As I look back over the past three years and look ahead to my final year in Bend, there is so much that has shaped me. An instinctive cynic, I didn’t believe any of the college experience and remained skeptical of Notre Dame’s branding. Community is one thing, I was here for the diploma.
But sometimes you get the things you really need without even trying. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have goals for college, or that you shouldn’t put in the effort, just that you should embrace the opportunities this place so abundantly offers – even if you don’t recognize them right away. Many of you will struggle to make the lifelong friends you were promised, while others will find them right across the street. The most important thing is that you spend a lot of time here, however fleeting it may seem in retrospect. With all the pressure to make friends this weekend, know that most of us old folks aren’t hanging out with our friends from Welcome Weekend.
The same goes for the career and academic prospects that are available to you – and that’s the supposed goal of college, isn’t it? Effort is not a bad thing, but fear is. Not everything works out right away, and as much as I overanalyze the college experience now, there’s little point in doing so.
Italians have this concept of “sprezzatura,” which means “studied sloppiness.” In that sense, you should prepare and get work done while still allowing for the relaxed cool of a day in the sun on campus or rambling conversations inspired by Instagram memes about Brainrot.
You start your adult life here, and this is where you learn how to have fun, what you want, what habits are healthy and what aren’t. Personal learning will continue for decades, but this is a great place for trial and error. I’ve learned so much about so many things. And yes, some of that came from reading. I know I said you don’t have to read anything (most professors know that will never happen), but you definitely should read and learn. I would never have sat down and read the entire Lord of the Rings if it hadn’t been for a course that gave it up over the course of a quarter, and my thinking is regularly influenced by everything from a spiritual reminder in a medieval history class to a Melville story I read in political theory. It’s cliche, but try to learn things beyond the upcoming midterm.
“If we do our job right, these shouldn’t be the best four years of your life.” That’s the advice the legendary former admissions director gave a former Observer columnist. That’s a little hard for me to hear right now, as I can’t imagine life getting any better than my time at Notre Dame – or when I traveled the world on the university’s dime (getting scholarships!), and I fear the world is a lot harsher and less secure than the security blanket we have under the dome. But you always have to have faith. This weekend is just the beginning of the beginning.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Observer.
