I am a freshman. Forty-four years old with a college degree and twenty-two years experience, but a freshman nonetheless.
I work in Hovey Cottage, but I might as well be living in Wolcott, Martindale, or the cold dorm at Phi Psi. The freshmen and I are in the same place: brand new, trying to find a comfort zone, make a few friends, and find a niche.
I arrived in September full of hope and ideas, eager to make a difference yet wary of making mistakes. Career changes will do that to you.
After two decades of working in higher education, most recently at a state university out west, I was drawn to Wabash because it was different. But this place is more than that. Aside from one too many conversations about Middle Earth and second breakfast, Wabash has taken me by surprise.
Those surprises include:
? The vibe on campus. Neither laid-back nor geekishly academic; I’ll call it driven;
? The relative simplicity and exceptional depth of the Gentleman’s Rule. The perfect moral conundrum for a 19-year-old;
? How quickly people acknowledge you on campus with a friendly “hello” or a head bob;
? How poorly the Betas park. On good days the lines are a mere suggestion of perpendicular, but on snowy days all semblance of spatial recognition is thrown out. You’d have better luck dropping cars from a crane;
? The enormous quantity of pizza given away at academic presentations. It makes me want to forget my lunch to play academic roulette, randomly educating myself with a slice of pepperoni;
? The balance between arrogance and confidence in students. Arrogance is confidence without accomplishment. Maybe it’s the legacy of this place, but underclassmen seem to have more of the former, while upperclassmen possess more of the latter.
Part of my job in communications and marketing is to tell the rest of the world about the connections Wabash makes for students, so I’ve spent four months focused on those links myself. The best part of it all is the genuine excitement in their voices as Wabash men speak of this place.
There was Brent Bolick ’91, in Jacksonville, FL. He and I had never met, yet we ended up talking for an hour and 15 minutes before we picked up the menus at lunch. It was like speaking with an old friend.
There was head campus Resident Assistant Spencer Burk ’14, who told me that his parents said that they always felt comfortable leaving him here because “all of their questions were answered.
“There is a different feeling here. You leave here knowing that you’ve been helped and feeling like people are here to help you.”
There was Scott Purucker ’16, the first to boldly volunteer for what’s become my series of chats with students.
“I’m always thinking of things,” he told me. “I’ve always got ideas. I don’t know [where they come from], but that is the exciting thing for me. It could be anything.”
There was Derrick Li ’14, who described a project he was working on with Purucker and two others.
“I couldn’t find three better people to work with,” he said. “We dream big. I knew that these three guys, if we came up with something interesting, that had traction, we’d go out and do it.”
There was Hezekiah Eibert ’15. He’s lived in the Phi Psi house longer than any home he’s ever had; living in so many places has given him a different outlook on life.
“We were talking about this in history class: The American poor have a refrigerator, TV, and a microwave. The world’s poor don’t have enough water to drink. It’s about perspective,” he told me. “I’ve had so many more opportunities than a lot of people get, so I’d like to help others in the same way.”
I didn’t expect a 20-year-old to say such things with conviction. Eibert did.
Of all the things I’ve heard from Wabash men, none was more passionate or told a better story than sophomore Sam Vaught’s description of playing the organ in Pioneer Chapel.
“I get to go in there whenever it’s not being used—often in the dead of the night—and just play…create so much sound,” he told me. “You go in there in the middle of the night and you can rattle the windows with that instrument. No one is around and I can forget about everything else and just play.”
Think about that: How cool would it be to rattle the Chapel windows in the middle of the night?
In the end, I guess Wabash has done for me what it does best: Connected me in un-expected ways, one conversation at a time. “You have to be good at making connections,” Jason Siegel ’08 told me in December when I visited him in Florida. “That is where Wabash helped me the most.”
What makes the Wabash experience unique is not how you affect it, but how Wabash welcomes you. I knew that Wabash would be engaging; I didn’t expect Wabash to so fully engage me. That sort of connection is at the heart of what I hope to tell the world about Wabash. While I was worrying about how I was going to do that and how I was fitting in, it was nice to have 182 years of collective history tap me on the shoulder and say hello.
Richard Paige is associate director of communications and marketing at Wabash.