The Real World within sight

Beep! Beep! Beep! 10:45 a.m. Slam! Beep! Beep! Beep! 10:54 a.m. Slam! 11:03am. Why this early? It's Friday! What did I have to do? What was I thinking? Oh right. Go running. 60 degrees. Not bad. Sunny. 11:49 a.m. Yikes--one minute to get to weight training. Breezing through The Chronicle on the bike.

12:41 p.m. What next? Hmm. Maybe Foster's. Or food points? Foster's. 2 p.m. Just in time to make "90210" reruns. Wonder what's going on this weekend. It's finally begun. Or did it begin yesterday? Or Tuesday really?

Well, I did have class today. It's a rough life. Too bad it'll be over in about a month and a half.

What comes next? The Real World. Death in some people's eyes. In a way, college does seem like a retirement community. You're constantly with people the same age and generation, you take exercise classes together during the day, play golf together and play cards at night--in some form or another. You're all waiting for some dreaded thing. In college the "one who cannot be named" is the Real World.

In the Real World, depending on where you choose to live, this world has an entirely different schedule. At 10:45 you'd be on your third cup of coffee, 10:54, you're working on your fourth memo and at 11:03 you'd be running out for your 10-minute lunch. Five minutes of course if you're going into banking. So long to DukeCard play money and beer on points. In New York City, a land in the Real World kingdom, for example, instead of a card swipe it's a $10 sandwich and a $3 cup of coffee. No wonder grad school applications are up so much this year. Who wants to spend from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. in a cubicle when you could be on the quad with your Crimson keys or Stanford or Yale flex accounts? Granted, the job market is in the dumps right now as hardly anyone's hiring. But, hey, maybe the unemployed are better off. Their lives are more like ours here in college anyway, at least like the lives on MTV's "Real World." If only that were possible. The problem is that in grad school classes are more difficult than Intro to Jazz, keg stands are few and far between in the hallowed halls of Harvard Law and the like, and kayaking does not count for credit. On the job, some placements do provide Fridays and Saturday nights as a weekend break, rather than the Tuesday-through-Saturday-night weekends that students sometimes take.

As an intern last summer for a Manhattan newspaper, I was assigned to report whether or not bankers on Wall Street are depressed by asking them 10 questions, among them, "Do you drink more now than you used to?" "Do you sleep well at night?" and "How is your sex life?" I was more comfortable asking people I knew rather than strangers on the street, so I called a few recent Duke grads. Their unanimous response was "Enjoy college while you can!" One said she slept five hours a night if she were lucky. Another spent two entire nights the previous week dozing in his desk chair. Another replied to the third question, "Sex life? Ha! It's not the Hideaway anymore. You can't just drag someone back to your room, especially if you're at the office til 3 a.m."

So, is there no hope? If the Real World is such a sleepless, sexless, joyless place, then what does graduation mean? After coming back from spring break, it feels like I'm asking myself the question, "If I had one day left to live, what would I do?" on a different scale. There's a month and a half left of free time. What do you do with it? Study as hard as you can? Network? Party? It goes back to the question of "What is the purpose of college life?" To be honest, I haven't found many more conclusive answers than when I posed the question in a column sophomore year. I have realized, though, that what college does do, at least Duke does, is that it shows you what you would do with a blank canvas. With every area of interest, every area of study and almost every social option available to you in one place, your choices and how you spend your time show you who you are. Maybe you fell in love with medieval architecture. Maybe you had a brilliant soccer career, or maybe you partied every night. At least you now know what makes you happy. You know you can spend four years happily with people you never knew before, choosing clubs, groups and classes all by yourself, and you can come out on the other end OK. When you graduate, in May, you'll know what keeps you going and what you do best.

Alexandra Wolfe is a Trinity senior and a senior writer for Recess.