My dad often tells this story:
During his friend’s first semester at the University of Vermont, an English professor asked the class to write on the question “why are you here?”
His friend stared at the prompt for 15 minutes. Then got up from his desk, left the classroom, turned away from the path he thought he’d wanted, and walked straight across campus to the registrar’s office.
He got back 80% in tuition reimbursement for the semester, took a freelance photography gig with a snowboarding company, and apparently never looked back. I often wonder how many students’ lives that professor’s question changed.
When I arrived in Middletown last fall, I had a fairly certain notion of why I was there: to develop a greater sense of self among like-minded others, to become inspired by interested people, to discover fresh passions and deepen old ones, and to indulge in the revelries of collegiate years.
“I’ve enjoyed much of Wesleyan my first semester here,” I wrote to a high school advisor in early February 2023. “I’m excited about future programs, courses, activities, etc in Middletown—I do think I’d continue to feel satisfied at Wes. And yet, sometimes I feel I absolutely cannot talk about Tarantino with another film major here…I’ve been considering the possibility of life elsewhere.”
The decision to give college applications the ol’ college retry was far more pragmatic than pessimistic. I’d applied to college in a COVID-19-drenched admissions cycle without campus tours (location seemed nebulous; Zoom webinars took place in my bedroom). After a gap year of work, travel, and discovery, I wondered if I had drifted too far from my applicant-self. I didn’t really think I would leave Wesleyan, but I was earnestly curious about exploring other possibilities as a way to inform my current one.
Yet, my decision to apply did also stem from a real dissatisfaction with student-run institutions. I’d left the NCAA running program and was looking for a then-absent running club; I had been denied entrance to the music department jazz ensemble (“Who are your favorite drummers?” the director asked during the audition. “John Bonhan and Chad Smith,” I replied) and desired a vibrant jam scene. In my eyes, this absence seemed to mark some more foundational yet undefinable lacking.
“Wandering around campus Saturday night,” I wrote in a journal entry dated September 2022, “I couldn’t help but think ‘is this it?’”
Larger schools, it seemed, must surely have deep-rooted infrastructure for student groups. And with that, greater fulfillment? Community? Someone to grab me by the shoulders and say, “Kid, this is life”?
***
At some point in this conversation, people invariably ask where I applied.
“That’s really not the point,” I respond.
“Yes yes, we know,” they say. “But c’mon.”
To eliminate that distraction (really, it’s not the point): I applied to the University of Chicago and Brown University.
Which—and I always follow up with this quip—“is really rather funny, isn’t it? Pretty much polar opposites on the fun-o-meter.” These days, I recognize I didn’t really know what I wanted when I applied to transfer, just that the process seemed like some necessary stepping stone to figuring it out.
Applying to Brown checked off a box as a Wesleyan rite of passage, and UChicago seemed to provide that old-building, hallowed-halls mystique that I thought might be the answer to whatever questions I was asking.
Brown said “thank you, next” and saved me from asking if I actually wanted to leave Wesleyan. I never opened the letter from UChicago. By May, I had realized their mystique wasn’t for me. I am confident in my decision not to transfer there. If I had known the possibility had existed, it would have always haunted me—what might have been?
***
I’m super-duper grateful I stayed. I found most of what I was looking for academically in Wesleyan’s College of Social Studies and socially in the Outdoors Club, dinner parties, bands, and intramural teams.
I have, unironically, become a Wesleyan Tour Guide.
“So it has been good, and really I have been quite content,” I wrote to a friend over winter break. “Which of course sets up a foil, which is that for how lovely a semester it’s been, I do continue to feel a sense of ‘what if?’ and ‘what else?’”
This deeply human question of other possible lives feels especially visceral at 18, at the crossroads of picking where to spend the next four years of your life.
“Much must be left unsaid, unseen, unlived,” Joshua Rothman concluded in my favorite New Yorker article “In Another Life”. “Our self portraits use a lot of negative space.”
In correspondence with a mentor last spring, they averred that there are two types of people in college: “the cheerleader types who lovingly celebrate their place, and the always wondering type.”
I feel, and know not yet if to fear, that I am the always wondering type.
While we’re at it, I had a lovely freshman year, and most days I am deeply happy and affirmed in my decision to stay. Yet, last term I still found myself in reverent awe reading about the Yale Political Union, or the Middlebury Outing Club, or the Cambridge University comedy scene. And yes, I don’t think I would be particularly happy among the pre-consultant suits in New Haven or the prep-school cliques in Vermont, but there’s still a part of me that goes “Oh, but wouldn’t it be great to live at a school with those institutions?”
In Carl Dennis’ poem The God Who Loves You, that wondering becomes quantified.
“What would have happened/Had you gone to your second choice for college”? The conversations in whatever dining hall and night walks through whichever streets might have added up to “a life thirty points above the life you’re living/On any scale of satisfaction/You’re spared by ignorance?” he asks.
I remember talking last spring to a friend (who attends one of those schools whose student clubs have endowments).
“I like the place,” I told her, “I really do, but I don’t constantly feel surrounded by brilliance.”
She laughed at me for a good while, and I supposed: yes, god, what an arse.
***
My friend, graduating in three years (and saving his parents lots of money, no doubt—a better son than I), often points out that we’re only in school 26 weeks of the year. We have a whole other half to do whatever we fancy. College is not even just four years of your life, it’s little more than two. The conclusion, he implies, is that our time here is so short that there is necessarily so much more than this.
But considering other lives did inspire this one: buoyed by what could be, I helped start a humor publication, and this paper’s new Editorial Board, and led backpacking trips, and organized stand-up nights, and I’ll keep on planning.
Ultimately, I think the hours (god, so many hours. I probably know more about the Middlebury housing lottery than most of their deans) I’ve spent reading Yale Daily News weekly columns or the operating procedures for Cambridge’s student-run theater are not wasted longings, but some practical foundation for how I might change and grow here.
But is daily life really that different at other places anyway? Stripping away the architecture and the geography, isn’t the quotidian experience, Cambridge University student Katie Heggs asks, still just that of universities? “[T]here are drinking games, shit clubs, breakups, missed lectures, and forgotten essays,” she writes.
Maybe. But I’ve done far too much research. Indulge me a moment.
One night over break, I spent time scrolling through all 454 of Yale’s registered student organizations.
Highlights include but are not limited to: Yale Magic Club; Yale Magic the Gathering Club; Pokemon Go Club; BBQ, Cake, and Dairy Societies; The Yale Curling Club; The Existential Threats Initiative; and The Yale Looking for Friends Club, whose website lists a hopeful 33 members.
The Magic Club rejected half of last year’s applicants, according to reporting from The Atlantic, as did the Existential Threats Initiative.
There is a wonderful Wesleyan informalness to life in Middletown, where students seem to engage earnestly in classwork or extracurriculars not because they’re stressed about post-grad career options, but because they’re curious and excited and motivated to create. I cannot overstate my gratitude for the lack of academic or extracurricular stress at Wesleyan. And yet, we don’t have an existential threats discussion group with a shiny website and competitive admissions cycles. Very few clubs on campus require any applications at all. Part of this is lovely, but also part of me longed for student-run institutions so ingrained, so meaningful, so full of purpose that their main critique stemmed from an excess of enthusiasm and drive.
I realized that I was searching for institutions and clubs as a conduit to the people and community behind them.
“And that’s when I finally figured out what the Earth was really like,” Simon Rich concluded in the wonderful Shouts & Murmurs column “History Report.” “It was something people talked about, and praised, and maybe even tried to save, but the whole time what everybody secretly, actually cared about was the person sitting next to them. We never even really lived there. We lived in the presence of each other.” (If you read no other reference from this article’s bibliography, please read this one).
My friend—who had transferred twice before transferring to Wesleyan a final, third time—arrived at the same conclusion. “At the end of the day,” he recently told me, “I thought my college experience should check all these boxes, but what really mattered were the friends I had with me.”
***
“[College is full of] these tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers—partner-less, tired, awake,” then-Yale-student Marina Keegan wrote in her now-classic essay “The Opposite of Loneliness.” “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together.”
In Jesicca Winters’ recent New Yorker book review column on the ethics of having children in the face of the climate crisis (“Birth Pangs”), the critic observed that the central theme throughout many climate-kid-ethics pieces is not ‘How can we save the world?’ but ‘Will I be a good parent, can I be a good parent, even when the world falls apart?’
We don’t try to prevent global warming or build careers for the sake of those specific, pragmatic objectives, but rather to be closer with each other, she concluded. Those objectives enable and express our desire to be close.
And I think my wondering about college and what-could-be arrives at a similar place: I don’t really care that the Middlebury Outing Club seems wicked rad, or that the Cambridge Footlights own a pub, because the mountains will be there and there’s plenty of alcohol in our freezer. I think my wondering is a wish that Wesleyan had those caliber institutions as a way to build deeper relationships with others—what I actually wanted when I applied to transfer elsewhere was to be closer with the people here.
All that time, I wasn’t really looking for hikes in the White Mountains. I was searching for this not quite love, not quite community. I’m finding it more and more every week.
“Which in many ways is a really wonderful realization,” I texted a friend. “All of this is really quite possible.”
“It all just takes time and improvisation and building some of the things you want to see and do in the world,” I wrote. And however seemingly saccharine that perspective, the semester’s already been a wonderfully new type of college experience.
“Also, unrelated,” I concluded my text, “so far so good with no mono symptoms.”
Ah, to be young.
***
Dennis’ “The God Who Loves You” concludes that we should cherish the life to which we have “a claim to authority, the life you’ve witnessed / Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.”
After all, David Lipsky muses, “Of course, you end up becoming yourself.”
In one of those “How did I get into Yale? Stats and more!” YouTube videos that one finds oneself watching far too late at night, a student remarks, “If I went back to my senior year high school self and was offered acceptance letters from every college in the world, I would pick Yale every time.”
While I still have wonderings about college, I feel with similar confidence that if offered the chance to live any other life, I would most certainly live this one.
It is, after all, the only one I know. I am grateful to have become myself.
***
So for today, for the estimated 10% of first-years who will apply elsewhere and for those wholly here, let’s remind ourselves why we came to college. Send me your reading recs, and let’s get drinks, and go on runs, and perform, and write, and plan, and become ourselves.
Let me know how you think—I wonder if that is why I am here, after all.
Thomas Lyons is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at trlyons@wesleyan.edu.