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Speculation on Tradition
The summer between my sophomore and junior year feels like it should be more chaotic than it is. I feel like I should be running from unpaid internships to low-paying office jobs, traveling back and forth between friends and family on the weekends. It feels like I should be reading more books I’ve been meaning to read, watching more movies I’ve been meaning to watch, and going to a ton of summer concerts in Millennium Park.
In some ways, it has been that summer, that traditional college summer where you think you are taking a break from it all, but in reality you’re still not getting any sleep. If that is traditional anymore, I do not know. Maybe college summers were never supposed to be that way.
At DePaul, we often prided ourselves on being the untraditional university, making students live college life through the city’s eyes, relying on Chicago for their summers and school years. There was always an experience, that fact is something any DePaul student cannot deny, but not that of college, rather of Chicago. We are not the traditional college town, surrounded by corn fields and the Greek system. But then I wonder, what is the traditional college experience? My friend Brittany sent me this article, an essay asking that same question. Asking even more questions, I should say, that have not been asked of the college experience recently.
And I’m left wondering what college life is around the country, what the traditional college student looks like and acts like. And whether or not I fit into the category.
By
Hafsa Arain
|
August 9, 2007; 11:26 AM ET
| Category:
Salaam Chicago
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Posted by: Barrett | August 15, 2007 12:37 PM
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It's interesting that you brought this idea up because it's something my family has always wondered about my life in the city. I chose not to go to the family college -- where I would have been a third generation legacy on one side of the family and second generation legacy on the other. It was small town, very intimate, etc. My experience at college has been so different than my family's, so they can be really quick to judge mine as... not really inferior, but A-typical. But I think the "college experience" is one where you just grow up. If it's the "classic" experience, the small-town, the religious school, or the school with the city in the backyard, I think the point is to come into your skin and start making your way as an adult.