For me, college was always some distant, unexplored frontier; the place my brother vanished into, the source of much of my parents' 1980's nostalgia trips, a vague unfulfilled promise of green pastures and delicious dining hall food.
I blinked, and suddenly, I was saying goodbye to my friends and packing my room, leaving my bedroom wall unnervingly bare. Another seemingly split second, and I was helping my Pop lift a mini-fridge into my dorm room. To date, I have been at Washington and Lee for approximately two days, though it feels like it's been about a week.
Because I'm in the Leading Edge Pre-Orientation program, the buildings are strangely quiet and empty; I'm likely one of maybe three people on my hall. Bear in mind that all of my experiences thus far have been with only one-sixth of the full student population of WLU, so next week will probably be much different as we welcome everyone else.
So far: I have been utterly floored by how beautiful the campus is. It's ridiculously spacious for our 1,800 students, a fact magnified by how few are actually here. As it's located in the hills and valleys of Lexington, Virginia, the landscape allows for sweeping vistas and quaint back-campus trails that seem to stretch for miles.
Personally, I wanted a college relatively different from the high school I went to: a relatively impoverished, crowded, deteriorating inner-city public school (though with a fantastically diverse student body). It seems like literally everyone I've met at Washington and Lee are ecstatic to be here, and the few professors and faculty I've encountered have been bright and eager to talk to me.
I had the luck to be given an international student as a roommate, a fellow first-year from Beijing – quite the culture flip from my experience in southern Alabama. As far as I can tell, my RA is a lover of European History and a Shakespeare fanatic; facts that pair well with my unnecessarily generous love of Lord Byron and other romantic poets.
Though Washington and Lee really is lovely, it's required me to leave behind some of my closest, most passionate friends and companions I've spent an inordinate amount of time with over the summer. It seems like everyone else stayed close to home – either going to South Alabama, University of Alabama, or Southern Mississippi, where I picked a school almost thirteen hours away.
It's isolating, sure, being approximately 700 miles away from the closest person I know. Though the Internet aids everything about keeping in touch with my friends, I have essentially zero chance of going home until December.
Nevertheless, it's a life-changing opportunity to be able to go to this school. Everyone keeps telling me about how four years will go by in a flash; to me, just one or two months will end up feeling like a year. From what I can tell, though, I made the right decision back in April in deciding W&L.
