The University has the distinction of being all things to all people

"The thing that's so hard about Michigan," she says, "is that everybody here does everything. If you go to some schools, all everybody does is party. If you go to other schools, people study all the time. But here, everybody works hard, but plays hard too. That's what makes it so tough."

It makes life at the University tough sometimes, yet is part of its unruly greatness. It is part of what lets the University often attain the impossible, and be all things to all people.

Jeff Eldridge From the Editor

What you're interested in doesn't matter much - English literature, college football, economics, beer, eyebrow piercing, chemical engineering. It doesn't matter if your ambitions include the U.S. presidency, or if you would be content as a lifelong couch potato. In four years here, the chances are pretty good your interests will be met.

Glance through a short list of high-profile University alumni - names like Madonna, Arthur Miller, President Ford, the Unabomber suspect and Dick Gephardt, as well as an array of legal giants and business leaders. It's a mystifying collection of people. Sure, Harvard can brag about Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Tommy Lee Jones and Walter Lippman. That's a more formidable crowd than Ann Arbor can boast.

Who cares? You've got to love a place that has "The Crucible," "Like a Virgin," the post-Nixon White House and the House Democrats on its side. Let Yale boast Bush and Clinton, let USC boast O.J. Simpson - Michigan can rightfully claim to have everything a university needs.

There will be a day, probably soon, when you realize this. Any given day contains a small adventure and around every corner there lies something surprising.

For me, it frequently comes in a lecture hall, where the best professors dazzle hundreds on a daily basis. With 18 classes under my belt, I can only name one bad professor. Plenty of people talk about learning more outside the classroom than in it; I suppose that may be true, but it's a terribly distorted observation. Some of the best stuff here is rooted in the lecture halls and the minds of the people that occupy them.

But you'll probably disagree. Maybe you'll embrace the full scope of the place sitting in Michigan Stadium one clear Saturday afternoon, surrounded by 104,000 of your best friends and getting pelted by marshmallows. Or maybe it will be late on a Friday night, wandering the streets of Ann Arbor with a few friends, tipsy and giddy, but happy glad to be here. Maybe it will come sitting in the Michigan Theater, perusing Monet in the Museum of Art or eating something deep-fried at The Brown Jug.

Buckle up, and embrace the bizarre. One of the strangest moments I recall was being at a party in the wee hours of the morning, when a former sitcom actor materialized. (This is not a lie.) After being spied smoking marijuana while sitting on a laundry machine in the basement, he was ultimately taunted out of the house, and sprinted into the darkness when a camcorder popped up from the crowd and drunk, chanting kids called his character's name out through the night. From the sublime to the crass, learn to love it. This place can be better than Disneyland.

This is a place where smiling kids run naked through the streets on the last day of classes. It's a place where socialists and Christian fundamentalists both will accost you in Angell Hall's Fish Bowl. It's a university for sorority girls and hippies, rabid sports fans and articulate intellectuals, where hari krishnas and frisbee tossers call the Diag home.

Don't let yourself get overwhelmed by all these options and so much freedom. It can be tough maintaining self-discipline, especially if coming here from the suburbs, or a small town. It can be tough, arriving from a personalized corner of the world - but in two or three weeks, 5,000 new students will find themselves delivered to a collage of people, a barrage of activity. They'll be the masters of their own destinies, to choose to dye their hair green or to study electrons.

Hell, who knows? Maybe there's a future material girl hanging out somewhere in the bowels of East Quad. The argumentative kid in your political science section may be a future congressman. The guy in a room down the hall with the pungent smoke seeping under the door may write a bestseller in 15 years.

They could all be here. And in their next four years, they'll probably find what they're looking for. The pictures in the brochures and accounts from your older friends are all here, too. But so are a million more stories and experiences, waiting for you to jump into the fray.

-Jeff Eldridge is an LSA junior, the New Student Edition editor and a Daily news editor. He can be reached over e-mail at jeldridg@umich.edu.

09-03-97