Dear Mt. Ida Transfers,
Welcome to your first full semester at The University of Massachusetts Boston–if you decided to stay with us this far, that is. And if you did, good for you. Even despite the massive inconveniences I’m sure this caused you, I hope you find something worth their time with which to occupy yourself other than, hopefully, your studies. Which, while worthwhile in themselves, shouldn’t be all you do here.
In a way, I sort of came here like you all. I’m not one of those people who asks for much from anyone in life at any rate, but a Sunday drive through the peninsula on which this campus rests never fails to remind me of a small country. Even a year in to my degree, and I was begging to come here. Of course, it helped that even with the accumulated student loan debt this has caused, it was much easier for me to simply continue as far in to a degree as I could get away with than it was for me to just go out and get a job.
I did horribly in high school, and after my six years at a community college, I was just as sure as I was in the beginning of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life–not very sure at all, even after graduating with two majors and exploring one, the latter of which of course failed as I switched into my first full degree that I did graduate with.
Here’s the irony: doing so much better in my last few semesters of community college in my English/Creative Writing degree allowed me more room to decide what to do. Feeling an equally ironic pull to UMass Boston, I can’t quite explain even now, I decided to bother with the transfer process and see what I could find here–I found the need to find out for myself.
And that landed me with my first job, writing for The Mass Media–only after but two struggling semesters and short nights of sleep writing what I thought somebody like me out there might need to hear. My first week here consisted of me being constantly on my toes, thinking that my long enough time at community college had me with no right to be here and that somebody was going to pull me aside and throw me out. I swear I’m not as paranoid as that just made me sound.
Now it’s like I’ve always been here. Not to say I’ve forgotten my time at community college, it’s more that memory has a different feel to it when I look back and recall my past college days not spent here at UMass Boston.
I hope you wake up one day and find yourself with that feeling as you step onto campus. It’s an interesting feeling knowing you did something right with your life even if it wasn’t quite what you expected.
So, join a club. Spend late nights in the common rooms at the new residence halls studying with friends, if you were one of the lucky few to get in. College should never simply be about writing papers. I’m a much different person than I was at community college, and definitely since high school.
Listen to your gut if it tells you to explore something–even if it’s just going to the library and studying. Though it can get a bit distracting amongst the noise of the nearby Starbucks addicts, this is something that I’m sure will die down the moment the Dunkin’ Donuts opens in the Campus Center.
Just do me a favor and don’t hole yourself up at home doing the bare minimum to get out of this chapter and into the next. That’s not how life works–trust me, I’ve been there, too. Life’s about getting lost. It’s okay to wander so long as you find yourself through it.