You land a one.
It’s a Friday night, and you find yourself sitting with a lone few in O’Neill library. You ask yourself if it’s all worth it, and like every time before, you convince yourself that it is. You put these high expectations on yourself because you’ve realized how important school is for you. And at the end of the day, you find yourself feeling fulfilled.
You land a two. It’s a Tuesday afternoon and you’re running from Lower Campus to Stokes. You trip on the Million Dollar Stairs, and as you pick your heavy bag up you realize that you’ve overcommitted. You try to be the most involved, because you equate free time with sterile, wasted time. Yet all this beautiful chaos is what gets you through the all-nighters.
You land a three. Like any Thursday night, you find yourself at Patron’s. You drank too much again, but it’s your freshman year—it doesn’t count. You pride yourself on living the college life, the dream. Your first semester grades may not have been the best, but you’ve created some true friendships that have passed the “housing test”—for you, having those people in your life is really what college is all about.
You land a four. You’re on date. Where? Lost in the beautiful pair of green eyes staring back at you. This is the first date you’ve ever been on. You were apprehensive about the idea, but somehow Kerry Cronin’s advice made you say yes. And you’re pleasantly surprised: the conversation is amazing, the food is good, and your fear of commitment seems to be long gone.
You land a five. You’re lying in bed, and you just finished the final season of House of Cards. This is definitely not what you expected of college. Coming out of high school, you saw yourself as approachable and social, but your time at BC is making you rethink that. You’ve tried to meet people, but it’s just not working out. As you begin Orange is the New Black, you try to convince yourself that this isn’t too bad, even though you know you’re looking for something more.
You land a six. You greet what seems like thousands of lost, terrified freshmen. Somehow, you got put in charge. As Orientation Leader, you yell the number “17” trying to assemble all your sheep. You debunk the many myths about BC that your small group raises, and you try to make the freshmen as comfortable as possible in their new home.
Last Thursday, the members of the Boston College Class of 2019 received their acceptance letters. In only a few months, they will embark on this crazy journey that is college, and all of us will be a year older. It seems like I committed to BC just yesterday—when I did, the expectations began. I imagined what my life was going to be like to the very last detail. After hearing “College is what you make of it,” I thought I had the power to shape my freshman year into exactly what I wanted it to be.
What I failed to realize was that the “big letter” did not give me this power of intelligent design. Rather it gave me a set of dice. From the moment we stepped on BC campus for orientation, the dice began rolling, and we followed the number. Quickly, we realized that the numbers were not the ones we envisioned and that we couldn’t control the outcome.
As BC gets ready to welcome a new freshman class, take a step back. Many of you will be pleasantly surprised to see that your numbers were actually right for you. Many of you won’t. It’s hard to move on from the numbers you had memorized before coming to BC and to accept these new ones. But if you look back and are unhappy with how things turned out, pick up the dice, and roll again. You can’t design your experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to settle. Nothing stops you from re-rolling. The question is, will you have the courage to?
Featured Image by Breck Wills / Heights Graphics
