Column: On the brink... again

During my freshman year I wrote a column called "On the Brink" for America Online. In the beginning, I had envisioned it as a web diary, a way to let future freshmen find out about what they were getting into. But as things written by 18-year-olds tend to do, it quickly devolved into a series of musings on the meaning of life. At the time, I thought it was terribly wise.

"On the Brink" was sponsored by the College Online channel, which went defunct during my sophomore year. Some months later, I stumbled across the column on a Geocities site. It was all there, with a nifty little preface: "Four college freshman [sic] picked to have their first year college experience chronicled, charted, detailed, and scrutenized [sic] before the whole internet [sic] world!" In the days before reality TV, this seemed very cool indeed.

The column was ridiculous. My advice read like something out of Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, supplemented with Garth Brooks quotations. No joke: My final deep thought was "things really do work out for the best." But for whatever reason, a few of the things I said in that column remain true today. I'd like to pass them on now.

I miss my parents.

I never thought moving 350 miles away from my family members would bring me closer to them. At first I was too distracted by my shiny new life of working hard and playing hard to notice that Mom and Dad weren't around anymore. But the luster of stereotypical college life faded, and in the last three years, there have been so many times when I pined for home. When I left for college, my sister had a baby boy. He's four now, and he has a new sister named for me. How many smiles have I missed? I suppose that, like most things, a wonderful family isn't something you appreciate fully until it's gone.

Everything has been in a constant state of change, and keeping myself stable throughout it has been a real challenge.

I'm not sure I had my priorities in order when I got to Duke. In fact, I'm not sure I ever had priorities at all--I just threw myself into everything with equally reckless abandon. Thank God I didn't try to keep that up for long.

It was fun, but it didn't give me stability in a sea of change. Only prioritizing can do that. Sometime between sophomore and junior year, I made the choice to dedicate myself to the things that made me enormously happy--The Chronicle, my studies and a small group of people who cared about me. Unsurprisingly, they turned out to be the things I treasure the most today.

Most of the things I wrote as a freshman made me laugh. When I reread this one, the Chapel bells were ringing and the staff was gathering in the office lounge, as it does at 5 p.m. every day. I was sitting at my desk and I started to cry. I sat there for 30 minutes, waiting for the bells to stop ringing. In all the excitement of graduation, it hadn't yet occurred to me to be sad.

I'm on a very different brink now. In a little more than a month I'll be living in New York (I've never been there) and working for Newsweek (I grew up with Time). It's slightly more intimidating than Duke was--by the time I moved into Gilbert-Addoms I'd already been on campus at least six times. But I'm not at all scared.

Many, many times, I've questioned my Duke education. I've often thought that if I'd done more of my reading or scheduled fewer 9:10 classes, I'd have learned more. But looking back on how silly I was as a freshman, I know I must have learned something since then. Maybe these four things are it. I think they'll carry me through the future just fine.

Mary Carmichael is a Trinity senior and executive editor of The Chronicle. You can read the original "On the Brink" at http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Lab/9396/mary.html.