The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

This is the third part of a three-part blog post looking back at my first semester at American University, and the challenges and accomplishments that I have had to face in the marathon that was this past semester. This third part looks back on aspects and thoughts on my first semester of college life in general; see also Part 1 and Part 2.

I’m typing this blog post right now on a plane somewhere over the midwest, ultimately bound for Oakland (via a stop in Albuquerque, of all places), and finally ultimately bound for home. I probably would have preferred to have written this post back in DC; unfortunately packing and dorm-cleaning got in the way of accomplishing that goal.

Ultimately though, today is a proud day for me, as today marks the end of my first semester in college. I don’t think that I’ve ever anticipated a day as highly or for as long as I have anticipated today. (Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I’ve been counting down the days on there for the past four weeks.) I actually was here for a relatively long time this semester: a full 123 days. I got here on Saturday, August 15th, the earliest possible move-in date, two days before freshman welcome week, and stayed through today, December 15th, a day before the latest possible move-out date, and four days after my last final. Most AU students got here between 3-9 days after I did and left up to a week before I did, and most of them also went home for Thanksgiving Break. So by AU standards, I was here for a LONG time.

This semester was also significantly long for me in other ways. Never before had I spent more than ten nights way from home in one sitting, and this time I spent 122 nights away from home. In fact, I even went back through my memory and tallied up the total number of nights that I had spent away from my family in my entire life (all of them within the past seven years): the tally before I left in August was 83 nights. Today my tally is 205.

And in some ways my extended length of time away from home was a good thing. I repeatedly told people this semester that I saw this first semester at AU as a marathon: the goal was simply to make it to the finish line. While there were a number of good things about this semester, there have also been many, many times when it has–not surprisingly-felt like the semester from hell.

Random side-note: Trying to type a blog post when you’re sitting in the middle-seat on an airplane is not fun on the arms.

My first week at AU actually kind of felt a bit like a vacation, or like one of those week-long trips that I’ve taken out of town. Part of this feeling was caused by the fact that it was only welcome week (classes hadn’t started yet) and I was still mostly living out of my suitcase until I got more moved in during that first week. But it was towards the end of my second week that I had a moment of reality hit me, as I realized that I was going to be living like this and supporting myself for the next fifteen weeks. That was a very vulnerable moment for me that is actually interesting to reflect on in hindsight now that those fifteen weeks have since passed by, and I have had a number of similar homesickness-induced moments throughout this past semester.

Homesickness is really a difficult thing to try to explain. Sure, you can look up the technical description of it on Wikipedia, but I don’t think that there is really any sort of “according to Hoyle” type of homesickness. But I feel that my homesickness this semester wasn’t due to loneliness (because there were certainly plenty of people around here to mix with this semester), or due to being unable to communicate with my family from back home (because cell phones and e-mails took care of that easily), but rather simply being divorced from everything that was familiar and that I took for granted in my life at home. These ranged from something as big as the supportive community at the church I practically grew up in to something as small and basic as a home-cooked meal.

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But college life wasn’t all doom and gloom. Here’s a “thumbs up-thumbs down” look at some of the more notable aspects of life at AU that I endured this semester.

THUMBS UP: Washington Metro
Noting that I have yet to use public transit in New York City (which I’m told is supposed to be really good), the Washington Metro (Metrorail and Metrobus) is the best public transit service I’ve ever used (and as you may have heard, I’m a geek when it comes to public transit). Metrorail is certainly much more frequent, more convenient, and cheaper than BART, San Francisco’s equivalent. Which is good, because quite frankly if you’re going to live on campus as a full-time student somewhere, it is vital for you to be able to get off-campus, even if only to grab a bite to eat and come back. This becomes all the more essential at AU where you can count the number of on-campus places to eat on the fingers of one hand, so getting off campus once or twice a week was very important to me. Fortunately the Metro made this routine possible without having worry about timing or breaking the bank to do so.

THUMBS DOWN: TDR (Terrace Dining Room)
TDR is the one dining hall on campus, meaning that it’s the only place to go to use our meal swipes (freshmen have to invest in 150 swipes minimum per semester). Which would be okay except that 80% of the time, they’re playing loud music over the loudspeakers in there, which is almost always rather obnoxious rap music (my least favorite kind). Perhaps they haven’t heard that some people (like me) like eating in peace. I would probably attribute the annoyingly loud music in TDR to the reason why I’ve actually lost a bit of weight this semester. However they do have good food most of the time and a number of healthy food choices, but in both of those categories they don’t even come close to a good old home-cooked meal.

Other Campus Venues
As I mentioned, there aren’t many other on-campus places to eat, but the ones that are there get a split. Subway definitely gets a thumbs-up for having the healthiest non-TDR food on-campus, and so I’ve grabbed sandwiches there many times this semester despite my refusal to believe that Jared ever wore those jumbo-sized jeans. McDonald’s is in the middle; while I refuse to believe that their food is real food, they have the most convenient hours on campus. While I try to limit my presence there, the “fast” part of fast food has been necessary a few times. Another big thumbs-up goes to Einstein Bros. Bagels, which I started frequenting when I learned in early November that I was running out of meal swipes. Their sausage/egg/cheese bagel became a nice breakfast regular for me, and is less than half the cost that a meal swipe would add up to.

The main thumbs-down here goes to The Tavern, which serves more fast-food types of things like burgers, pizza, nuggets, fries, etc. The servers there are the rudest people I have ever come in contact with. The first (and only) time I ordered there, they yelled at me because I had the audacity to be in the middle of filling up my drink cup at the fountain when the first half of my order came up, and then they refused to give me the fries which I had paid for. It is in fact common knowledge on campus that you will be yelled at if you order food in The Tavern, yet a number of students don’t seem to mind. Me? I very much do mind, and I swore that I would never eat there again, no questions asked.

IN THE MIDDLE: AU Shuttle
I’ve been to Stanford’s campus, and they have a very complicated shuttle service with multiple routes, schedules, etc. AU’s shuttle is much simpler: it goes between campus and the Tenleytown-AU Metro stop. (It also has a stop at Tenley Campus along the way.) An alternate route goes between the Metro and the Washington College of Law (another AU campus). Because of traffic, it does generally take longer to go to the Metro than to get back from the Metro, and it can get crowded during peak hours, but otherwise it runs as a good shuttle service should. Except for the fact that about a week into the start of classes, AU came up with the idea of the “Super Loop,” an awkward combination of the two other routes, which runs on weekdays after 8 PM and full-time on weekends. The Super Loop route is essentially the WCL route, except that once it returns from the WCL it then goes through Main Campus before heading back to the Metro. This isn’t too bad for the people who live on the north side of campus who are still fairly close to where the Super Loop stops, but people like me who live on the south side either have to get off with the north side people, cross a busy Massachusetts Ave. in the dark, and walk all the way through campus (about an eight-minute walk), or stay on the shuttle for the additional 15 minutes it takes to go to the WCL and back. A lot of students are angry about the Super Loop, and so far nothing appears to be changing, hence the reason why the AU Shuttle doesn’t get a thumbs up.

THUMBS DOWN: Dorms
Living in dorms isn’t entirely bad, because you do get to know people. And as for my roommate, I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate to live with this semester. The part that I can’t stand is the noise. Noting that I historically prefer to be an early morning person and have generally tried to go to bed around 10 PM or shortly thereafter, finding out that quiet hours here started at 11 PM on weeknights and 1 AM on weekends was a little bit disconcerting. And even then it will still frequently be loud on the floor an hour or two after that. The walls in Anderson Hall are thin, and my room is located right at the intersection of two loud hallways with my bed right next to the hallway-facing wall. In other words: trying to get to bed early in the AU dorms is a lost cause; my average bedtime this semester has fallen between 12-2 AM, which is why 8:30 AM classes are so hard to pull off (despite the fact that I went to high school starting at 7:50 AM for four straight years). At least I probably won’t have to worry about jet lag when flying back and forth between DC and the Bay Area!

THUMBS UP: Library
This past summer, our local library in San Mateo had to make cuts to their hours, with the hours of 11 AM-8 PM on M-Th, 11 AM-5 PM on F-Sat, and 1-5 PM on Sun. (Actually they were closed on Sundays for a month and a half during summer.) So you can imagine the shock of going to a university library which is open 24 hours for most of the week. AU’s Bender Library regularly opens at 9 AM on Sunday and doesn’t close again until 9 PM on Friday. Saturday hours are 9 AM-9 PM. And for the weeks before/during finals they had a complete 24/7 schedule. (Of course between 11 PM-7 AM the library is restricted to AU students and staff only.) While I avoided the library during finals week, because I was told that it was insanely crowded, the library was certainly a godsend during the month that I went without a computer.

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Conclusions
Adjusting to life at AU has been an even greater challenge than I had anticipated it would be. Part of the challenge has simply been the initial challenges that everyone goes through when they have to live on their own and support themselves for the first time, such as planning for meals, shopping for groceries, doing laundry (ugh), budgeting personal expenses, and all of these soft skills while simultaneously maintaining a full-time course load. And all the while remembering that I’m supporting myself off of someone else’s money (mostly my parents’) because I am not yet earning wages or anything. If it wasn’t for my parents helping pay not just for my tuition, room and board, travel, books, etc. in addition to helping me meet my day-to-day expenses, I would count in the District of Columbia demographics as unemployed and homeless. And that’s a humbling thought.

But even more difficult to adjust to is simply how divorced I become from my normal life. Meals have long since ceased to be the enjoyable family gathering around the table to enjoy a warm home-cooked meal made with love. Aside from the few times when I can treat myself to a dinnertime outing in downtown DC or a neighboring city in MD/VA, meals are now simply a mundane chore that I do 2-3 times a day so that I don’t feel hungry. And that is probably the most dramatic example worth offering.

Fortunately, the one saving grace of this experience has been that I have not been alone in experiencing this. Virtually everyone here has been exceedingly kind and friendly (which is both a blessing and a curse due to my inability to remember people’s names), and the upperclassmen that I’ve gotten to know through my extracurricular participation have been able to impart a good amount of advice to me along the way. Even my professors have been very approachable and helpful when getting through some tough spots this semester. And that may perhaps be one of the reasons why my bouts of homesickness grew less and less frequent through the semester as I started to become more involved in other projects and channel my energy towards constructive tasks.

Overall, the college lifestyle is one that I have grown accustomed to, though I still don’t completely like it yet. That leaves a lot of open-ended questions for the future. Will I fare better in Spring 2010 than I did in Fall 2009? Will I be able to prepare some changes to my living habits that can make next semester better? For that matter, will this 24-day vacation back home be one where I will casually slip back into the place where I was before I left for AU, or will my return to the Bay Area feel somewhat awkward or out of place?

Those are questions for me to figure out in the near future. But if there is one thing that I have learned from my experiences this semester, it is to better value the blessings that I have taken for granted in my life, because those blessings become many times more visible once I have been physically separated from them. I would hope that this, my first experience living at a university 4,000 miles away from home, has made me more humble, more thoughtful, and more appreciative of everything and everyone around me.

P.S. One more “thumbs up” to music–both playing it and listening to it–which has kept me sane on a number of occasions. Turns out that “the healing power of music” isn’t just an expression after all. In particular, a “thumbs up” to my new favorite artist Pat Metheny, whose music is so expressive and captivating to listen to that it continues to soothe me despite having listened to it dozens and dozens of times this past semester.