Wabash Welcomes Class of 2007!

It wasn’t just the endless stream of overpacked SUVs slowly crawling through the Wabash College mall that led me to realize it was Freshman Saturday. See, there’s a fever pitch that builds for several weeks in August leading up to the big day when Wabash freshmen report to campus for the first time.

The ritual is familiar to me after all these autumns at Wabash. Teary-eyed moms hugging and kissing their sons “one last time” as anxious dads start to drive away, hoping to get well down the street before their own emotions begin to let go.

Then there are the smiling faces of the little brothers and sisters, who are smiling only because they know as big brother leaves for college they’ll inherit bigger rooms and the family car.

As familiar as the tradition is to all of us at Wabash, it’s important to know that each class is unique and every family is different in the way they approach college. Some parents will come for every home football game; others will never see one. Some freshmen will drive home every other weekend, while some rookies won’t see their parents for a whole year, maybe longer.

So while the sights and emotions of Freshman Saturday at Wabash are recognizable from year to year, I do try to remind myself that for all of these kids Wabash is a completely new experience, one that will be different for each of the 250 new students.

To get a bead on who these kids are, I annually turn to my colleagues at Beloit College, who put out a list of reminders called “The Mindset List” to help us understand the freshman demographic. Maybe you’ve seen the list, which goes something like this:

College freshmen this year have always lived with computers; they’ve probably never dialed a rotary telephone; they’ve never owned a record album; and the console television is as foreign as the Edsel. To them, McDonald’s has always counted its burgers in the billions; “Big Brother” is just a TV show; and a guy with a southern accent has always been president.

In general terms, these guys were born in the mid-eighties, got their driver’s licenses after the turn of the millennium, and virtually all of them will come to campus with cell phones.

But again, each kid is different. We’ve got eight or nine freshmen from the state of Arizona and a whole slew coming in from Texas in what has become a pipeline of sorts.

One freshman graduated from high school in three years, another turned down an Ivy League offer to attend Wabash, and a third who was offered an appointment to the US Military Academy. Oh, and several guys in this year’s freshman class were home schooled.

There’s a football player in the class who has decided he wants to play soccer, another who is a championship rower, and there’s even a guy who showed the champion dairy goat at the Indiana State Fair.

Yes, the Freshman Saturday ritual looked real familiar to me. But the 250 new students represent 250 new stories and 250 new lives that will be forever changed by their experiences in Crawfordsville over the next four years.