Jeff Davis | Vent Section Manager

4/19/02

I came to RU with a metric buttload of credits from political science, biology and English. This means I’ll be walking across that platform, with the swooping nylon gown, receiving my diploma (well, a case for one anyway) in December. While I’m thrilled to get out of school so early, there are some cons to this as well.

The biggest disappointment for me will be leaving my friends before it’s time. The greatest people I’ve known were at RU. We spent long nights talking, watching movies, eating food we probably shouldn’t be, drinking things we probably shouldn’t be, and heckling everyone, even ourselves. Then there were delicate times where two people were in a room alone and bore their souls. Take that any way you want. When I jump into the real world around Christmas time, my friends will still be in school and it’ll be harder to keep in contact.

On the other hand, I am getting really anxious. My favorite feature of the campus is its people but once I travel outside that bubble I’m bombarded with biscuits and gravy conservativeness. One day I might appreciate those values but not while I’m young and innocent, as Dr. Liss often puts it.

I’m looking forward to getting more focused employment for my time before graduate school. Ever since my internship with Leisure Publishing, I knew that I wanted to be an editor. I was offered, in so many words, just such a position with a newspaper whose name I’ll omit should they have found someone else or not have the opening anymore. It’d be a great place to start out for me.

Yet sometimes I know I’ll remember how easy I had it here. My longest in-class time here was this semester, with 200 minutes sitting in a desk on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’ll admit I’m not too crazy about any of the classes I have on these days but that isn’t the point. All I had to do was grab information from the lectures and apply it. Now I have to be the one distributing the information to a staff of writers, designers and salespeople.

The best part of graduating early, I’m told, is going to a ceremony where not a lot of people are in attendance. Therefore, I could invite tons and tons of people whereas in May 2003, the place will be clogged up the kilt with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and little tykes. I hates me some traffic, but if you’ve ever looked at my section before now, you know that.

I think in the long run I’d want to be sitting there on Moffet Quad with the countless people I’ve known and loved at this school. But these people know how excited (and restless) I am for something more than this planned, precise college world. They’d be shocked if I stayed here another semester, and at the same time, I don’t think they’d mind.

Thanks guys.