I have learned a lot during my four years at Duke, but one of the most important things I’ve learned is how to be efficient with my time.
It’s the end of the semester, my senioritis has reached an all time high and the spring weather is making it nearly impossible to concentrate. As I type this, the warm sun is pouring into the third-floor causeway, reminding me that if I had written this earlier, I would have been able to join my friends at the pool.
So, in order to leave Perkins ASAP (I’ve got FOMO, you know), I’m going to kill two birds with one stone: This is my final column as an undergraduate, but it will also serve as my second-to-last writing assignment for one of my English courses. How’s that for efficiency?!
The assignment: Write a one-page farewell statement to the class.
But I am going to write a farewell statement to all of my class friends.
“Class friend” is a term I use casually in my everyday jargon. I define a class friend as someone I have or have had class with (duh) and also someone I would probably never have met had I not had class with this person.
My teammates, sorority sisters and roommates think it’s hilarious that I make a valiant effort not only to befriend my classmates, but also to actively seek them out in social settings.
In the Great Hall: “Oh, a class friend! I’ll go sit with her.”
At Shooters: “Hey, it’s my class friend! I’ll see if he wants to be my beer pong partner.”
On Spring break in Miami: “No way! A class friend shopping on Collins Avenue! I need to say, ‘Hi.’”
On Facebook: “You have one friend request from Josh Hammer.” Who’s that again? Oh yeah, he’s my class friend. I accept.
The relationships I’ve built with my class friends are clearly not comparable to those I’ve made with my teammates, my sorority sisters and my roommates, but how could they be? I only spend three hours a week in each of my four classes and more often than not, the majority of our time together is spent listening to professors and furiously taking notes.
No, my class friends and I probably won’t be lifetime pals, but I will remember them fondly when I reminisce about the academic chapter of my time at Duke. My true class friends have never called me a nerd when I wanted to discuss the readings further. They have never called me a dummy when I asked for help with a problem set. And they always greeted me with a smile, both inside the classroom and when I accost them from across the dining room at Parker and Otis.
Interacting with the other students is at the heart of what has made Duke so special for me. I find my class friends to be some of the most interesting and accomplished individuals I’ve encountered during my time on this campus. And now I’m going to embarrass them.
To Greg: You + a passion for constitutional law + four years of hard work = Harvard. Congratulations.
To the other Molly: Our love for Paris and the countless American novels we have struggled to finish (“Absalom, Absalom!” comes to mind first) make our shared name and class friendship something I will never forget.
To Charlie: You have graduated and probably won’t read this, but I think you are incredibly brave for jetting off to the Mississippi River Delta to teach ninth-grade math. I hope your experience has been worthwhile.
And to all my other class friends that I have not mentioned by name, thank you for always being entertaining, for usually being friendly and for consistently upping my number of Facebook friends and Gchat contacts over the past four years.
Farewell, class friends. I can only hope that my future “work friends” will be as classy as you.
Molly Lester is a Trinity senior. This is her final column.
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