Four Weeks To Go

 It's hard to imagine a schoolyear coming to a close. I'm a freshman, so this is the first time this has happened to me; it's weird to think that in the summer of 2008 (was it really a year ago?) I thought senior year of high school had lasted surprisingly quickly. High school, where we sit in a building for six hours, with very little time between classes, coming home loaded with more work to remind us of what we learned in a relatively small period of time.

I can still remember how I felt coming onto this campus in August, checking into my dorm, and having very little of an idea what was going on. Slowly but surely, the huge bunch of buildings turned into structures with names. The campus' layout started making sense, I learned how to find things without just wandering around Patriot Circle, and not long after that I started to learn the layout of the city itself. I can't quite put a finger on exactly when this happened, beyond the date Chow Hall was closed and replaced with Southside.

What helped, probably, is that one day I was trying to find Thompson from Sub I. I read the map wrong and instead of walking a meter to the right and getting there, I walked in circles around the entire campus for the better part of an hour and a half. 
 
What's amazing is that I also remember coming here in April of 2008, a year ago, and it feels just as recent! It was a pre-orientation event, and it was raining horribly; our group ran, in the rain, from building to building, soaked and miserable. I actually remember my first sight of what would become Southside and the Chesapeake dorms; looking down that hill from the Johnson Center, with Sub II to the right and a pile of dirt and a foundation in front of me. 
 
Only now, nearly a year later, is the post-high-school-graduation mindset being replaced with the dear-lord-is-that-paper-really-due-in-a-week college mindset. Even then, if I look at it from just the right angle, I can still remember the overwhelming structures as I saw them in 2008. And I've got about three years to go to forget all that, just like I've forgotten about being overwhelmed by high school and middle school.
 
And now I really do need to finish those two papers.