Watching the sun rise above Lake Michigan is like watching the sun rise everywhere else.
It’s still gorgeous, invigorating and well worth the sleep you lose to remind yourself that every day brings something new.
But in the end, a sunrise – even on the Lakefill – is just a sunrise. It didn’t feel like an iconic Northwestern moment for me, which got me thinking.
The premise of this column was nine things I’d never done at NU. Nine iconically NU things because after four years of busyness, there were so many experiences that I’d missed here. And how could I graduate without having tried them? How can we graduate if we haven’t stuffed ourselves full to the brim with classes, extracurricurlars, nights spent goofing off with friends, club sports, trips to Core, football games – the list goes on.
When do we ever again get a chance to have the experiences The Purple Book and NU tour guides insist all undergraduates should have?
But when the sunrise at the Lakefill left me kind of cold, I started to wonder why I was so concerned about fitting in NU landmarks. Don’t we all make our own iconic experiences?
We do. After four years, we all have traditions of our own that mean just as much as heading to the Union on Friday nights or trekking up to the football stadium for Saturday morning games.
We all have the restaurants where people know us by name. There’s at least one bench on campus with our butt permanently imprinted on it. And finding constant detours around the perpetual campus construction has to be considered a new NU tradition.
Do you remember when no one studied or met in Norris and the building was never full?
Did Al ever recite your student ID number to you when you forgot your WildCARD at dinner?
Remember when NU beat Ohio State in football? When we didn’t have Nuonlinebooks? When the White Sox won the World Series? When the Evanston City Council’s biggest worry was the elm tree disease? When Joy Yee’s was actually open?
The experiences that should define these four years are the ones that mean the most to us, not the ones that a guidebook would outline as the can’t miss events. The collective experience isn’t nearly as important as the individual paths we took to get here (or continue to take, underclassmen).
The fact that the woman at JK Sweets starts making my ice cream the second I walk in and then we chat means more to me than that I had a Chicago hot dog. My roommate knows the Burger King security guard by name; he calls her his “movie star,” and she’s probably spent more time in the BK Lounge than in the library – but it was definitely time well spent.
The times you’ll remember when you look back aren’t what I’ll remember. There are more than 2,000 students in the 2008 graduating class (at least half P.O.ed about Mayor Daley) and none of us left exactly the same campus footprint.
Leave your own set, too.
Medill semior Christina Alexander can be reached at [email protected].
