I stepped up to the curb. I planted my foot on the cement. As soon as I heard, “On your mark, get set, go!” I ran with all my might. A hundred yards later I arrived at my best friend’s house. My arms flailed and my feet pounded onto the black tar. Her brother won the race.
As a kid, I ran lots of neighborhood races. But sometime between now and then the rules changed. They became crooked and complicated. What used to be a simple foot race turned into a race to apply. Instead of tennis shoes and socks, we need resumes and applications.
Old rules: Start at the mark. Run from point A to point B. Try to get to point B first.
New rules: fill out form. (Form includes many pages. Form asks about taxes — I don’t know anything about taxes. Form asks about phone numbers, responsibilities and experience.) Rinse and repeat a hundred times. Wait for the phone to ring, check email compulsively, go to interview, brownnose (“what a nice sweater” or “you’re so accomplished!”) while still waiting for the phone to ring. Rinse and repeat.
This form of competition is far evolved from the foot race.
At my friend’s house, the biggest obstacles in the games we played were the trees in her backyard. Each and every one of us ran into a tree. Big trees. Will chased Rebecca with a stick. She ran into a tree. My brother jumped for a football, but smacked into a tree. I collided with a tree while doing a backflip. As I raced down the yard backwards, no one seemed to think yelling, “Stop!” was necessary. Smack. Too many trees.
Grades and experience are the obstacles now. And the injuries tend to be more severe. For example, when you go out and get drunk, still show up for your test the next day, fail your test and fail the class, your GPA plummets.
The race no longer involves point A and point B. Point B is of no desire. With no end point, we just want to have gone the furthest. The race is infinite.
Someone will always be further ahead in the race. He or she will beat you by age, luck, wit, speed or something else.
We’re all in college together right now, but in a few years we are going to be competing in the “real world.” This summer, a fellow intern pointed to two of the biggest sycophants I’ve ever met and said, “Just be thankful you are graduating, because I have to look for jobs at the same time as them.”
They were good. She had an excellent point. I will be working before they even get to start looking, so at least I get a head start in the race. But what about all the people who are already ahead of me?
College presents a twisted dilemma. We are set up as a community to be friends and help each other, but the moment we finish, we are set up to compete against one another in the job market. All I really want to do on a Sunday is watch America’s Next Top Model reruns on MTV with my roomies, but instead I find myself stowed away in my tiny bedroom reading about contracts. It’s all to get ahead.
BU itself is an arena. We are already competing against each other. Professors put up bell curves and tell you grades don’t matter; you just want to get above the mean. But we don’t just compete for grades, but for friends, contacts and party invites. You name it. Community and competition confront each other in college.
Think about the people around you. Your roommate might become a druggie, a millionaire, a movie star. Who knows? Facebook will keep us informed, though. Facebook — the stalking tool of our generation — will allow us to use each other in some twisted fashion several years down the road.
If, in the future, Facebook informs you that your druggie roommate now works at Microsoft as the regional manager for New England, what are you going to do? Call him, of course!
We forge weird relationships in college. Elevators serve as great meeting places. Sometimes people will “Facebook friend” you after meeting you in the elevator. It’s all right now. We are all guilty. But when random Warren C Tower Elevator Buddy gets a hot job in a few years, will you call him?
“Remember me from C Tower? You know, the elevator? We met that one time?”
Your C Tower friend will have one of two responses: either “Uh yah, what do you want?” (“To use you for your job, of course!”) or “Um no, you freak, how did you get my number?” (hang up).
I can’t really predict how these phone calls will end up going, but I know they will be made. I’m looking forward to receiving one some day. I’m sort of dreading the fact that I may give one. If the line goes dead in a few years, it was probably me.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
