The places you will be from

“Welcome back, Class of _______!”

The campus has been groomed, accommodations for returning Blue Devils blooming. For every white-roofed tent built atop the still war-torn Krzyzewskiville lawn, students are reminded that they’re one year closer to donning a name tag and mingling with other alumni below their shade. As this year’s alumni gathering approaches, we move another weekend closer to final exams—another year completed at Duke. Another year closer to the end of our days at this Gothic Wonderland.

It’s difficult to imagine life beyond this place, even if you’ve got internships or job offers, your name waiting to be inscribed eloquently on a line next to the X. Maybe you’ve secured your future at some global firm; maybe you’re furthering your brainpower and expanding your education at some even higher institution. Maybe you don’t even know what couch you’ll be sleeping on post-commencement this year, or next year, or in three years. Regardless, there is often an incomprehensible surrealism associated with the clichéd implications of entering “the real world.”

I can’t imagine, as many would agree, that this collegiate experience is akin to any societal livelihood I will ever again endure. Regardless of whether I’d chosen to be at Duke or AnywhereU. I can’t imagine myself five or 10 or 30 years from now, for my sake and my parents’, swiping a card inked with an unattractive portrait of myself, attached to an account of food points that feed me three meals a day like Monopoly money. I can’t imagine myself sharing a bathroom with people I don’t know. I can’t imagine myself with black-inked X’s on my hands dancing atop the humid Shooters bar, listening to America’s top 40 hits accompanied by crying girls behind bathroom doors. These things (or some of them) feel like second nature to the 18-22 year old, but college is hardly a microcosm for what’s increasingly referred to as “real life,” or rather, legitimate responsibility and full-time employment. Life beyond bearing the title of intern. Life beyond the act of shadowing. The doing. The being. The incomprehensible, far-flung other end of “what you want to be when you grow up.”

As the faces of Duke’s past return to our beloved campus, as the once-undergrads weave through the Gothic arches in the pleasant Durham air—we current Blue Devils will be hunched over laptops, our fingers typing out papers in quick cadence so we may get to the other side of commencement. We’ll be deep within textbooks and notebooks, enduring the final push before the Duke Chapel bells chime for our departure in May. Too soon, the Chapel will be a distant, shrinking blip in the rear view mirror of our cars, packed with the textbooks we once buried ourselves in, the clothes we danced on the Shooters bar in and the beds we called home for four years.

The unimaginable title of Duke alumni, college graduate—seems a day we’ll never see the light of, but as our alumni return this weekend, we’re forced to acknowledge that one day, we’ll be those faces in the crowd. We’ll be the ones scanning the name tags and reminiscing about the professors and the parties, the good stories and the gossip. Come May, we’re another year closer to that side of academia, but we’re another year deeper and richer in memory and experience to reminisce when we’re here for our 10th or 30th or 50th reunion.

As final exams and papers loom over your sinking eyelids, understand that the work always gets done. So many students have a very real, very powerful fear of failure. Competition and stress are bountiful, seemingly unavoidable, and in the foggy and demanding home stretch of academia, too many students turn their days into 24 excruciating hours within a living hell. People stop holding doors for you as you trail them by mere feet. People push powerfully to ascend into the C-1 bus, as if there wouldn’t be another arriving, headed eastbound in mere minutes. People seem to lose their humanity in this period of intensity, failing to realize there is more than this small subset of time. Life is the big picture and the rest of the world. Life will work out, and losing your mind for two weeks every April won’t get you there any sooner.

Soon enough you’ll be back here, after you’ve walked in Wallace Wade, donning cap and gown with an earful of Pomp and Circumstance. And so will the girl you barreled through to get a seat on the C-1, and so will the guy whose face was slammed against the door you didn’t hold. You might come back with the memory printed on your transcript, the GPA you earned or maybe the job you’ve worked—but there’s nothing better than returning to the memory of your humanity.