First-year status offers fresh perspective, new challenges

Megan Schimpf Prescriptions

Time heals all wounds, they say. Take, for instance, senioritis.

After a year of development, senioritis is rapidly cured in only two weeks or so. Because as soon as seniors are put in an environment they've never encountered, with people they've never met, all the symptoms disappear.

Being a first-year student - or first-year anything, for that matter - is never easy, especially at the beginning. Whether it's starting college, graduate school or a new job, time moves on. And takes us with it.

The first year is a time when the precocious stability of being a senior comes to a screeching halt in the face of insecurity. It is not a time most of us would care to go through regularly.

But we do. About every four years, we find ourselves at an orientation, tossed with a group of semi-familiar-at-best faces into awkward introductions. We move from an environment where everything was controllable to one where we are controlled. It doesn't become easier with age or experience.

But as painful as it may be, starting over is important.

Because stagnancy is the alternative.

In school, we have the enviable opportunity of starting over in some way every fall. Campus changes every year, forcing us to readjust who we had become.

Walking to class without getting lost isn't everything. Try to call your friends, now that they have new phone numbers. Try to find your way to a store, now that you live in a different part of campus. Try to figure out what to do with all the leftover stuff in the middle of the floor when everything else has a place in your new room.

Still, there's nothing quite like the first year. Because while old-hand students adjust relatively quickly, first-years have eight months of firsts.

Orientation has the amazing feature of reducing everyone to a name, hometown, previous school attended and present address. Then you play "Do You Know ...?" and see if you can connect to Kevin Bacon, your best friend from kindergarten or both.

Conversations buzz happily along until everyone has told their story.

Then, silence. You shuffle. You desperately try to think of anything - anything - to talk about. You stare at your hands.

And you bring up the weather.

By the second day, this pattern becomes irritating in its predictability and superficiality. You realize how difficult it is to communicate with people with whom you share interests, but no experiences. How long it takes to explain something you're used to simply referring to. How inside jokes aren't funny if you're the only one who laughs.

Essentially, we're forced to shed our old images and roles and invent new ones. All at once, we have to draw on everything that shaped our personality, and forget all of it. We have to be ourselves, not our image.

It is difficult and painful and healthy, all tumbled into one.

For a short time, all those walls that build up during four years are gone. Anyone can talk to everyone. No one is a label because of something they did or said. Because no one really knows anyone else, everyone in the group is an equal colleague who brings something fascinating.

And so we can focus on people - even if conversations aren't deep - and try to know who they really are before chalking them up as the guy who sits in the front row or the person who actually owns the Hanson CD.

Being a first-year student means you've lost your security blanket. It means your friends are scattered. But it comes with a clean slate, where you start over and define yourself instead of being defined.

The "must-be-a-first-year-student" utterance whispered by older students actually comes with a hidden blessing. Any mistakes, directions or questions are simply chalked up to first-year ignorance. So do the wrong thing at the wrong time, get lost and ask silly questions without doing much more than tarnishing only the first-year image.

Instead of concentrating on what comes next, we get to concentrate on now. We get to enjoy what is, instead of what might be or what will be.

We get firsts instead of lasts, with more to come.

We get the privilege of looking at daily life with clear focus, untinted by past history or memory. Unjaded and naive, first-year students are able to attack new things with curiosity and vigor.

Call it first-year-itis.

- Megan Schimpf can be reached over e-mail at mschimpf@umich.edu

09-04-97