When you come visit us in the Middlebury Admissions office, we play a short video profiling a few Middlebury students to set the tone for the information session and tour to follow. While most of the movie is upbeat and sunny, in the last few moments a senior reflects on how sad she will be to graduate and leave Middlebury. It’s kind of a somber moment but it perfectly encapsulates our love for this place.
Normally, I sit in and watch the video before I start my information session, tapping my feet in time to the music and quoting the lines with the professors on screen. I know this video by heart now; I even dream it sometimes. When the video ends, I transition from the reflective last line to my silly description of a Texas girl buying snowshoes for the first time with a cheerful “And on THAT note!”
But that was last semester, fall semester, when the senior in ‘Senior Fellow’ felt more like a fancy title than an actual state of being. This state of being has an expiration date, and that date seems significantly closer on this side of j-term.
Today was our last first day of classes at Middlebury. There was the usual first-day jumble of adding or dropping classes, decoding the building acronyms on our schedules, and tumbling into the last chair in class with only a few minutes. But the “lastness” of it really hit me when I was rushing to fill up my tea thermos between classes and I overheard two brand new febs talking near the coffee pot. As I wiggled between them to grab some hot water, I heard one of the febs ask the other where the forks were in the dining hall. The other laughed and pointed to the enormous and fairly obvious island of utensils right behind her. For some reason, this small and silly interaction made me suddenly sad and nostalgic. Here these two new febs were discovering the utensil island for the first time and I’d been grabbing forks nonchalantly from that area for three and a half years now! I suddenly felt extremely old.
So now as I sit here on my last first day of classes, I’m vowing to walk into my information session after the video finishes playing. I’m doing this for all of you, future visitors, so that you don’t have to spend the first ten minutes of your first visit to Middlebury comforting a bawling senior fellow. Don’t get me wrong, I am so excited for all of you to come visit this spring and I can’t wait to talk to you as you start your journey here. But I am also insanely jealous that you have these next four years ahead of you.
As for me, time to start savoring the last four months.