It’s the beginning of the end of my freshman year of college. I find myself eating, sitting on another blue carpet in another Danielsen dorm room on another Saturday night, watching it become Sunday morning. Again. This time it’s pizza, and my friends and I are gathered around it, cross-legged, bartering for the last slice. MacBooks, open at all sorts of angles, purr sleepily on the outskirts of our feast, Daft Punk streaming loudly out of one of them. We might as well be poster children for Boston University’s latest brochure. All that’s missing is a photographer.
The metaphor extends beyond the common room and out into the street. The campus is a sort of stylized city and its students are just like the little neighborhood factions, gossipy and network-y, that define American suburbia. Hell, we BU kids even have our own bus system, which is as unreliable and rickety as its more mature doppelganger, the world-famous T. Whenever the university lifestyle starts to overwhelm me, I remind myself of its novelty and of the strong possibility that it’s not quite reality at all. It’s as if it’s a model of ideal living made of painted Styrofoam and with little plastic people and cotton ball trees, enclosed in glass in the middle of a museum. Don’t you feel like a spectacle sometimes, like a project?
Maybe our college lives play out this way because of how fictionalized they are in the media — yet accurately so. We at BU don’t have the same sprawling green quads you find on TV and in airbrushed magazines — instead we have a strip of grass beside Storrow Drive. Still, the BU Beach on a warm day — right down to that random kid perched against the tree trunk, just doing his homework — looks just like those fabled quads at every high school senior’s dream school.
Despite our unconventional campus — including but not limited to the mystery of the Myles Annex and the actual function of the Photonics building — we students are pretty spot-on in terms of collegiate-ness. We high-five outside the George Sherman Union in somewhat similar Terriers T-shirts while our friends whisper over homework in the library. It’s all so good-natured and stereotypical, you can practically see the shoulders of the mothers in the prospective-student tour groups slacken and relax. You can see the thought bubbles hovering over their heads as they think, “This place really is modern, urban, confident, diverse and dynamic. Academia at its finest!” Charmed, I’m sure.
But as an insider, my question all along has been this: Do we try to fit the stereotype, or does the stereotype form around us? At what point did college become less about the individual and more about the scene, about living it “right”?
Maybe it’s that college is a sort of real-life test course where we’re trained to fit into the stereotypes that we’ll need to embody later on in life. Why do you think it’s second-nature for School of Management kids to wear suits and ties every day to class and walk so fast? Why do the College of Fine Arts kids feel the need to draw on walls and smoke cigarettes everywhere? And the College of General Studies students? They’re always punchlines of party jokes from Allston to Massachusetts Avenue, regardless of their academic prowess. Still, unfailingly, you can count on some of them to reveal unsavory personal details that will inevitably end up on the Overheard at BU Facebook group. Why? It’s because life is about stereotypes, and college is about life.
I think it’s a problem. Of course, part of me loves the simplicity of it all, the by-the-book perfection that is our Boston University microcosm. I can wake up in my shabby-chic room overlooking the Charles River and the MIT sailboats, get dressed in my fabulously cheap designer-rip-off H’M clothes, overeat at breakfast in an eco-friendly tray-less Myles Standish dining hall and then spend the day meandering in and out of classrooms, taking notes, raising my hand, going to the library and drinking lattes. By the end of the day I can go to bed feeling accomplished, because I’m a college kid and I’m doing what I’m expected to do. It all feels very natural, and very right. This is definitely what we’re meant to do, readers: walk around in our little glass box, study and be watched and praised.
But then I wonder about the individuality aspect. I’ve seen dozens of kids on campus wearing the exact same Boston University sweatshirt I bought during orientation, and I wonder: Why does living the higher education lifestyle translate into assimilation and surrender? Why do we label ourselves, categorize, rate and rank? That’s what struck me most about college — while once I thought it was about broadening my future, I’ve come to find it’s more about narrowing, compacting and compartmentalizing. That’s one stereotype I can’t fit into: the I-know-everything-about-life-just-because-I’m-in-college type.
How do I solve this crisis? I’m only a freshman — I can’t even pick which shoes to wear tomorrow, and I’m expected to pick what kind of person I’m going to be after college? If college is a metaphor for life, life seems a little . . . constricted, with lots of red tape. Dynamic, sure, but only in the way a well-oiled machine might be.
My manifesto? Stop caring so much. Be a human instead of being BU. Stop asking me — and each other — about grades and majors and minors. Get out of the GSU and get the hell out of Mugar Library. Get to the park or a store or on a bus somewhere. Because if you’re only “good” at college, you’ll only be good at a certain kind of life: the kind mocked by sitcoms and magazines, the kind made fun of metaphorically through artificial picturesque college campuses and the kind that serve as backdrops for famous TV melodramas. College, I’ve realized, is a bit of a joke. The most successful students are those who know how to laugh at it.
Lauren Rodrigue, a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].