When I enrolled here, I imagined that my biggest adjustment to Duke life would occur between my freshman and sophomore years. One year passes and suddenly you don't have to get on a bus every day, your dorm room includes a thermostat and you finally have several food options.
But then you graduate from bricks to stone and face a stark realization. Some of your classes are still on East Campus, you live in Craven or Crowell where there is no A/C and the Loop does not count as "several" food options.
In fact, the only things that have changed are the bricks.
No, the real change happens between sophomore and junior year, because the truth is there's a sharp difference between lower and upperclassmen. And let me apologize in advance if my tone seems pedantic. It's hard not to sound patronizing when the term you use to refer to someone includes the words "lower" and "class."
On your first day as an upperclassman, you realize that half of your Duke experience is inexplicably over. You cannot possibly fathom the idea that you're closer now to the moment when you will graduate than the moment when you arrived.
Your older friends start disappearing. You know increasingly less about them as their Facebook usage declines precipitously. You find yourself telling stories about your long-lost friends to younger people who look at you like you're talking about flappers and speakeasies.
Even more disturbing, new classes of Duke students accumulate with gaudy, made-up names like "Class of 2011." How can a person from my generation actually graduate in a year like 2011? That's not real. Who actually graduates in double digits?
You're nostalgic for simpler times when there were fewer buildings on campus. You remember when the grounds upon which Bell Tower, French Science, Bostock and the Plaza were built were all pastureland and cows.
You remember what it was like to watch J.J. Redick rain threes in Cameron, the Sean Dockery shot before the Dave McClure lay-up and the last real bonfire (February 9, 2005).
You even remember when every column in the paper wasn't related to the lacrosse incident or the Campus Cultural Initiative.
And more than nostalgia, your entire focus shifts. College becomes less about the present and more about the future. Folks back home that used to ask you what you're majoring in now want to know what you're going to do after Duke. You just want to ask them to refill your Diet Coke.
Classes become relevant. The weight of a test becomes not only your grade in that class, but your prospects for getting a job in that field. I sure wouldn't want a doctor who made a 'C' in Organic Chemistry.
In a sense, you have a mid-Duke crisis.
You spend an exorbitant amount of food points, treating your friends to brunch at the Washington Duke Inn as if you were using guest passes at the Marketplace.
You buy a fancy new foreign-made bike and ride it brazenly across campus. You even ride it for unnecessary distances like from Wannamaker 1 to Wannamaker 2.
You even switch from Wilson to Brodie and from Perkins to Lilly just to feel young again.
You realize you've hit rock-bottom when you start watching movies starring Zach Braff about quarter-life crises. (Just me? OK, nevermind.)
And that's when you truly gain an appreciation for your time at Duke-when it's almost over. You fight to live every day at Duke with the tenacity of a Homecoming T-shirt distribution horde. You prioritize and develop your own list of graduation requirements that may or may not include library indiscretions.
And in that way, your last two years at Duke will truly be... the last of your two years at Duke. Sorry, I can't make any promises. Freshman year is pretty sick.
ZACH BRAFF and Brandon Curl listened to Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying" on repeat while they wrote this column. "2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu..."
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