As a tour guide in the Admission Office, I tell strangers three times a week that I’m doubling-majoring in neuroscience and economics. Usually I garner commiserative glances at the thought of the hard work my concentrations require. On occasion, however, parents and students do a double take. “Those majors here?” their confused faces seem to ask. “At a liberal arts college? Preposterous!”

Little do they know, around 30% of Wesleyan students major in the sciences. Among our peer institutions, we have the highest scientific research funding—more than twice that of number two, Barnard College, and some of the largest undergraduate involvement. (At this point in my career as a tour guide, I’m able to quote our fact books verbatim.)

I’ve also encountered families surprised by the eclectic mix of the student body, which includes few granola-chomping neo-hippies yearning to live on communes. Burgeoning groups like Kai Entrepreneurship Wesleyan and the nascent Wesleyan Republicans evince the variety of student interest and opinions present on campus. Undoubtedly there are some who readily identify with the modern day counterculture, but their influence is neither exacting nor domineering.

In fact, the demographics of Wes have changed radically in the last half-century. Once a haven for privileged white male alumni from East Coast prep schools, modern day Wesleyan is a melting pot where prep school progeny, first generation college students, and non-traditional students can be found seated around the same table in the dining hall, passionately discussing the issues of our time.

While the title of this piece may suggest a more existential topic, the immediacy of our shared experience and the common institutional memory we are cultivating is at once more accessible and perhaps easier to understand.

Though the majority of us lead impossibly busy lives, eschewing the Rule of Seven touted by our class deans, we must periodically take the time to assess our position at this university and in our society.

Why is each of us here at this small liberal arts college in central Connecticut at this present moment in time? What, if anything, binds us together as a community and encourages us to take such stock in our university?

Before I release my tour groups to return to their mundane existence, I recount what brought me to Wesleyan. Among the reasons I spout is the tenacity among the student body that percolates throughout all areas of campus.

Wes is by no means a pre-professional school, though you are sure to find students planning to matriculate at graduate school and spend another decade of their lives in classrooms and lecture halls. On a typical college campus, these students are among the most driven, constantly trying to better their GPAs and boost their resumes.

But that devotion isn’t restricted only to pre-med students. Here you are as likely to find a dance major working an extra 15 hours a week to better a routine as you are a biology student slaving over an agarose gel electrophoresis in a dimly-lit laboratory.

Some Wesleyan students are fortunate enough to know what they’re passionate about the moment they step on campus. Others will gradually realize what excites them most as they progress through introductory courses and late-night conversations with friends. Once that subject, research topic, or problem is discovered, dissected, and deconstructed, we latch on for dear life. No act of God can distract us or pull us away.

That same level of determination permeates into our level of social awareness and the activism displayed towards issues that are the most pertinent to us. We readily welcome dissent, condemn blatantly derogatory speech and expression, and work towards the creation of a more inclusive and free society.

Just as libertarians dream of having each state serve as an incubation tube for ideas and policies that could be enacted on a federal level, Wesleyan acts as a progressive primer for new systems of thought and perspective on the world.

Indeed, our focus on underserved communities in Kenya and India, our usage of gender-neutral pronouns, and our occasional freeing of the nipple may one day become commonplace in mainstream society.

Not that anything Wesleyan students do could ever be considered mainstream. By then, we would have moved on to issues and ideas that are far more avant-garde.

Our time at Wes, be it just for two years or for five, irrevocably alters and imbues us with a responsibility for changing the world and reshaping society. The world we left behind when we first moved to Middletown and that which we will eventually reenter can never be viewed through the same lens.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus reminds us that we never step into the same river twice. The constant flow of new ideas and concepts prevent it.

During my first week at Wesleyan, I read activist Peggy McIntosh’s famous text, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and away rushed the river.

Growing up in a largely homogenous, middle-class neighborhood, I couldn’t begin to imagine the preferential treatment given to me because of my race. The band-aids I wore when I scraped my knees all matched my skin tone. The characters in the books we read in school all had similar names to mine. I would never be asked to speak for all members of my race or have trouble finding greeting cards or toys that featured a white person.

Mounds of privilege suddenly came to my attention. That was only week one at Wes.

In the coming years I continued to explore and redefine my long-held notions about justice and equality within our society. Propelled by professors and peers alike, I was finally willing to ask tough questions about race, poverty, gender identity, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the appropriate size of government, the role of social services in society, hair politics, sexual liberation, our meat consumption, and the environmental crises our world faces.

Perhaps not all Wesleyan students will have such an immediate revelatory experience. For others, an epiphany may build slowly, staring down a telescope in a lab, listening to a particularly stirring piece of music, and lying on Foss Hill.

What makes our short time at Wesleyan so valuable is that these experiences are more accessible here than almost anywhere else. For these sparse few years, we are free to live as who we want to be, embody the ideas we care most about, and love with reckless abandon, ready to reenter the world we left behind and tear it to pieces.

Ayres is a member of the Class of 2017.