As more than 2,000 first-years, transfer students and graduate students move in this weekend, there will be more than 2,000 move-in experiences. Some of you will quickly find that there’s no way to avoid the fact that your walls consist of mislaid cinderblocks or that the singular decrepit stove pales in contrast to the dorm with sparkling kitchens on each floor. The AC-free August humidity (though the weather seems a lot more agreeable this year than my own move-in in prehistoric times) may propel you to take one shower after another, fearing the damage to your identifying Welcome Weekend T-shirt after yet another day of wearing it.
Some of you have dreamed about this campus your entire life, like a friend of mine who has lived and breathed Notre Dame his entire life, who can breathlessly recite monologues from “Rudy” for minutes on end. Others will watch “Rudy” for the first time on the football field in a week, like I did. Some of you will graduate without watching the scene where Rudy getting on the bus to Notre Dame after his father pleads him not to. Some of you will walk onto that same football field to graduate without ever seeing it. That’s okay — you don’t have to read every assigned text.
There’s so much in store for you in South Bend (or the census-designated block of land right above it containing these three institutions), and you will find that much of it isn’t in class. How appealing is a syllabus when the conversation in your dorm hallway enters its fourth hour and though eyelids have grown heavy, you have no desire to go back into your room? Looking back on the last three years, and looking ahead to my last year in the Bend, there’s so much that has shaped me. As an instinctual cynic, I didn’t buy into anything about the college experience, and I remained skeptical about the Notre Dame branding. Community is one thing, I was here for the diploma.
But sometimes you get the things you really need, without even trying. This is not to say you shouldn’t have goals for college, or that you shouldn’t put any efforts to them, simply that you should accept the opportunities this place offers so bountifully — even if you don’t recognize them immediately. Many of you will struggle to find those lifelong friends you’ve been promised, while others will find them living right across the hall. The important thing is that you have plenty of time here, as fleeting as it will seem in retrospect. With all the pressure to make friends this weekend, know that most of us oldheads don’t hang out with our Welcome Weekend buddies.
Similarly, with career and academic prospects that face you — that’s the ostensible goal of college, right — effort isn’t a bad thing, but fear typically is. Not everything clicks immediately, and as much as I’m overanalyzing the college experience now, there’s little use in doing that.
The Italians have this concept of sprezzatura, which roughly means “studied carelessness,” and in that vein, one should prepare and do the work while allowing for the casual coolness of a day in the sun out on the quad or meandering conversations informed by Instagram brainrot memes.
You’re beginning your adult life here, and it is here that you get to learn how you have fun, what you want, which habits are healthy and not. The personal learning will continue for decades to come, but this is a great place for trial and error. I have learned so much about so many things. And yes, some of that was in the reading. I know I said you don’t have to read anything (most professors know that’ll never happen), but you should certainly read and study. I never would have sat and read all of the “Lord of the Rings” if not for a class where it was assigned over the course of a quarter, and I’m regularly informed in my thinking by everything from a spiritual memoir in a medieval history class to a Melville story I read in political theory. It’s cliché, but try to learn things beyond the impending midterm.
“If we’re doing our job right, these should not be the best four years of your life.” That’s advice the legendary former director of admissions gave to a former Observer columnist. That’s a little hard to hear for me at this moment, as I can’t imagine that life gets better than my time at Notre Dame — or traveling around the world on the University’s dime (get grants!), and I fear the world is much harsher and uncertain than the safety blanket we have under the dome. But one must always have faith. This weekend is only the beginning of the beginning.
