remembering purdue

As mid-August rolls around and the local law school campus and the accompanying Target start to get busy again (and also starting to hang out with some high school friends again), I being to think back to that era of my life: freshman year of college.

Where I went to college, Purdue, wasn't a small midwestern town. With the main college town sporting approximately 44,000 people (up from around 30,000 when I started school), there definitely was a sizeable population moving around.

But even if it was small, something about the school's environment made it idyllic. Maybe it was the flatness (there were, though, some hills). It might have also been the general lack of restaurants, bars, and other entertainment. Or maybe it was that Indiana felt like a foreign land. Something about my time at Purdue will always be tinged with the crimson red of a sunset after a bout of rain.

Nothing was simple. Though there was a definite racial disparity on campus, we were all united by Jeff Brohm's beautiful brand of football and the terror of the engineering calculus grading curves. There could be bad weeks — like losing to Central Michigan University and bombing a test in the same week. But when it was good, it was golden — I was living the romantic dream of the American college experience. My first summer, I went back to Taiwan to help my dad's company with some software. How was it? some of my coworkers asked. Was it like the movies? With the frats? The sports? Parties?

Yes, it was. From the sea of students crammed into one calculus lecture hall, the collective head slap when our football team turned it over yet again, or the synchronized jingling of dorm keys during a basketball game. It felt like I was in a movie (the other time I felt like this was seeing a single-building high school for the first time in Ohio!).

So if someone were to ask me why I chose this particular school over the sandy beaches of Santa Barbara, the rocky cliffs of Santa Cruz, or where ever the hell else I got int, it's because I for some reason wanted to subscribe to this dream of college. For the college sports, the camaraderie, some notion of that movie magic.

If Purdue were the same as before, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it. It is a completely different school these days. The school is close to 50% larger than when I started freshman year, and the entry requirements seem to have become more stringent. Most of the liberal arts programs have been destroyed by an administration eager to turn a new leaf and much of the university's actions are done in the shadow of the research foundation.

But that's just how things are these days. I guess we just gotta go along with it.