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Adjusting to Wesleyan Life by Megan J. Wolff |
When I registered at freshman orientation last year, I received a mouse pad, a rape whistle, and a Frisbee. It was emblematic, an object to represent each of the things I would spend the most time and energy doing: The mouse pad for writing papers, the rape whistle for the discussions about socio-political issues, and the Frisbee for warm days on Foss Hill. It was Wesleyan all right: work, intellectual stimulation, and play.
The sophomores on my hall were fond of pointing out how novel things were to us at the beginning of the year. They would declare how energetic we were, tagging their statements with comments like, "just like at the beginning of last year." At that point I didn’t see how a person could not be energetic at Wesleyan. It seemed like the nature of the place. I have a clear picture of my room during orientation when the floors were still bare and the whole place was bright-sunny and hot because Connecticut hadn’t yet agreed to compromise summer. I was still wearing sandals, and my dark green carpet and comforter and tapestry hadn’t descended on the room. There was a Dean Moriarty act-alike on my floor who set the tone by playing ultimate in the hall (sometimes naked, which is permissible in WestCo). There were conversations around MoCon tables that lasted from the beginning of dinner hours to the time it closed, and similar conversations on the hall at three in the morning. We explored the tunnels, where decades of freshmen had written lines such as, "What is destructible is but a parable," and "We are the rules," too many times to read all the graffiti. Being on campus was the sensation of being at the center of something: the center of the kind of awareness that caused the distribution of rape whistles at orientation.
Things got harder, of course. My roommate and I were in the same FYI English seminar and while she calmly typed A essays and went out for a cigarette, I stayed up all night writing papers that earned reluctant C-’s and comments like, "Your ideas are good but you have no idea how to structure an essay." It was sobering. It was the mouse pad, but it wasn’t all bad.
Work at Wesleyan had a remarkable capacity to be entertaining mainly, I decided, because of the sense of humor rampant in the student body. You might call it the Wesleyan Slacker Mentality, which is the belief that no matter how hard you’re working, somehow you’re still slacking off. It leads people not to take themselves too seriously. My next door neighbor used to emerge from his room wrapped in a Mexican blanket, print-out dangling from one hand, and make comments like, "If I had just vomited into my printer the results would have been similar." Most papers seemed to be due either last week or within the next half hour. Procrastination, real or imagined, was a central theme which, I realized, was how the work ethic here tied directly into the spirit of play. Welcome to Wesleyan; here’s your Frisbee.
Freshman year for me ended up being mainly about learning the details that flesh Wesleyan out. It was about being minorly irritated about a lot of things and majorly irritated about a few, but pleased with the school on the general whole.
There were a lot of things to pick up and figure out; the Foss Hill lingo, for instance. It was an easy slang but that didn’t stop me from confusing it. I knew I lived on the second floor of Foss 2 but I couldn’t figure out where places like Down3 were. To say ‘Down’ anything implied a basement, which was an impossible residence to my knowledge since no one lived in the tunnels (at least not officially). Up2 would obviously have to be above ground, but could have been the first floor or the second. I figured I lived on UpUp2.
I learned a lot about how effectively the administration could dick a person over, through beauracracy and through policy. Mainly it was the course registration system, deceiving because in trying to fill space on the form we all wrote down things we couldn’t really imagine ourselves taking. Third secondary alternate, ‘Intro to Japanese.’ Sure, why not? The next thing you know you’re copying characters.
And then there were fire hazards. Anything made out of cloth or paper was a fire hazard. According to public safety, everything was flammable. All of the obvious ones - tapestries, hot plates, candles - were flammable, anything stuck to the ceiling was flammable, 11% and over of covered wallspace was flammable. I was surprised they let us wear clothes. But look around your room before you finish decorating and decide for yourself how flammable it is. Cinderblock walls and cool-tiled floors. Not very, but fire safety wasn’t taking any chances. Even the recycling bins in the hall were eventually declared dangerous and removed, as were my neighbor’s Christmas wreath and the WestCo tree (although it was unclear whether these things were blocking the way or flammable by way of spontaneous combustion; that’s all the dorm needs, decorations that spontaneously burst into flame). In any case, one afternoon they were gone.
During the year I figured out how to be idealistic and cynical at the same time, resulting in a very heavy sense of irony. It was horribly ironic, for instance, that at the end of each meeting of Chemistry, the Consumer, and the Environment (a class which focused on the extent of the Earth’s environmental damage) everyone dumped their paper coffee cups and plastic lids in the trash. It was even more ironic that after having been compelled to take the class because it was an NSM, and having slept through it 2/3’s of the time, Chem had a stronger impact on me than any other class I’d taken to date. That’s the way it goes.
Freshman year lightened up when the details stopped being so hard. My room, which had been collecting posters and illegal incendiary devices, stopped evolving by midway second semester. I learned to use the decimal system in the libraries. I knew where Up2 was. The year so far had kicked my butt by being rocky and unpredictable, but it achieved some normalcy halfway through. I even signed up with the Cardinal Key to be a tour guide, leading prefrosh and their families through the run-down of the school. Every Monday and Tuesday at ten a.m. I rallied my objective side and showed the school the way I had learned it, details and all. The results were decidedly positive. Even on too much work and not enough sleep I found that I liked pitching the University, that my overall story about it was good.
Just before finals I had a conversation with a sophomore friend about the passage of Wesleyan time, warped by the microcosm and the pace of semesters and classes. We agreed that each semester was the equivalent of about a year of normal time, having all the same qualities of beginning, learning, and closure. This explained why my class had stopped feeling like frosh by the beginning of Winter Break. There was still a separation between one class and the next, however. "Suddenly when you’re a sophomore time begins to move," my friend remarked. "You’re expected to have answers. As a freshman I wasn’t expected to have answers."
I nodded. It was May and I finally had my feet on the ground, with the answers for the day-to-day questions but not the notorious ones, not the ones that extend beyond school. That was coming in a few months, which is where I am now. I’m a sophomore living in WestCo again. It’s the same Wesleyan (the mouse pad, the rape whistle, and the Frisbee are still in my room) but from a different point of view. Now I’ve got to concentrate on other things, like choosing a major, which may require some thought about where my future is actually taking me. Meanwhile, I’m getting to know the new frosh, noticing how much energy they have and making similar comments to the ones I heard last year. I get to explain how things are, make jokes about fire hazards, and point out the difference between Up and Down2.