There's no place like Ann Arbor

But for a collection of reasons, I stayed. And what a year it's been.

I watched some of my best friends scatter literally across the globe. As I read their e-mail messages about new places and how they missed their old haunts, I could look out the window and see where they were reminiscing about, still my home.

After four years watching a promising team at the beginning of football season finish 8-4 in the end, I expected the same this year. Instead, the team won every major award (except an insignificant one) and later celebrated with a parade and pep rally. I spent New Year's at the Rose Bowl - one of the moments when you really grasp what it is to be a Wolverine - and heard Brian Griese ask what else the Wolverines needed to do to prove they were national champions. In 70-degree sun at the Rose Bowl in the shadow of mountains and a sea of maize and blue on New Year's Day, nothing could be sweeter.

Except, of course, when the hockey team won its second national championship in three years only four months later. In January, I learned there's nothing like being there; two weeks ago, I learned nothing compares to standing in the middle of South 'U' surrounded by hundreds of Michigan fans.

But athletics were only a fraction of what made this year unmatched.

Megan Schimpf Prescriptions

The University inaugurated its 12th president in September, a ceremonial end to the resignation, search and selection process that had lasted two years. That same president "hosted" a house party following the football victory against Penn State and quoted "Ode on a Grecian Urn" at a pre-Rose Bowl pep rally.

The University named its first woman provost, the Athletic Department hired a new athletic director and search committees began to fill the remaining holes in the administration.

The director of the Human Genome Project sang his own version of "My Way" to the first-year Medical students in November.

The first lady will speak at Hill Auditorium in a week and a half.

About a dozen Monet paintings spent two months at the Museum of Art, drawing art lovers and curiosity seekers.

In the fall, the University became the first public university to raise $1 billion, and now aims for $2 billion.

At the same time it welcomed its largest incoming class ever, the administration began to take steps to make sure no class would ever be larger.

An Engineering student competed for the crown of Miss America.

The men's basketball program lost one coach, found another, survived an NCAA investigation, and then won the inaugural Big Ten Tournament.

The regents voted to increase stadium seating to once again create The Big House, and to install video scoreboards in one of the two remaining stadiums without such accouterments. The renovations will forever change the face of Michigan Stadium.

Countless renown musicians, artists, speakers, comedians and guest professors - many of them alumni - have spent time enriching our education beyond what we are graded on. We interact with national experts nearly every time we go to class and sit next to future experts.

No other school can offer all this. Especially not this year.

We learned the depths of the complexity of affirmative action by being at its epicenter. Despite two days dedicated to protests and countless other symposia, all we decided is that the issue is far from simple. Multiple campus incidents of offensive graffiti and intolerant acts served to prove a new generation isn't as enlightened as we'd like to believe.

Good answers are hard to find.

We learned that no one is immune from death, including a woman who loved, then feared, her boyfriend and a man whose fatal flaw was excessive dedication to his sport. We watched as students just like us mourned students just like us, and tried to decipher why.

No easy answers came.

Anyone who has been in Ann Arbor for more than a month can attest to its little lovable oddities. They draw people here and create nostalgia over four years; they happen every year, every month, every day.

Yet other events and people set this year apart. It's made me wonder how I'd feel if I had scattered with the other members of my rain-soaked graduating class and heard about all this from another state. It would not have been nearly as special.

While soliciting advice last year about where to spend my next four years, a friend told me to never leave Ann Arbor, if that was possible. Something tells me it's not. But that's still years away, and for now, we are here. There's no place like Ann Arbor.

See you in the fall.

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

04-16-98