For the past year, you've allowed me to editorialize on all things AU - from shuttles to surveys to strategic plans. I've done my best to unravel different sides of AU for you. I wrote with one goal: to give students, faculty and staff another reason to pick up The Eagle.
Over my tenure, we've seen some pretty major events at AU. We've got a new president and strategic plan, renovated buildings and a redesigned Web site. Our Eagles danced in the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back years.
I look around and hardly recognize the AU that welcomed me on Preview Day in 2005. I hardly recognize myself, either. College is a time of personal development - I've refined my career goals, gained practical skills and had a well-rounded educational experience. Just like AU is a different place, I am a different person.
All these changes make me pause and wonder what AU will look like another four years from now. What will be the landmark AU events for the class of 2013?
What if we go even farther, say, 30 years down the road?
Even then, I'm sure I'll still be involved in AU as an alumnus. But I won't be on campus living the daily life of an AU student. The days of attending Gospel Choir concerts and Final Perk will be long gone.
In 30 years, graduation from AU will be an afterthought, and memories of our time as undergraduates will be gathering dust. We'll have new jobs and experiences that will overtake our recollections of our finest days at AU. It is a sad inevitability that our memories will fade. We'll forget the names of favorite professors, which dorm room we lived in. These past four years may have been life altering, but age and our continuing lives will do wonders to dull those memories.
A few years ago, I took a trip with my father back to his alma mater, Kansas State University. As we walked around campus, he pointed out buildings where he took classes and passed his time.
It's a trip many of us will take someday, when our own kids begin the college search. Eventually, we'll convince ourselves it's finally time to make the trek back to Tenleytown.
As we park in the Nebraska Lot, we'll glance toward campus. It will seem different. There will be new buildings. Trees will be bigger than we remember. The place we called home for four years will seem foreign - we'll struggle to remember the names of everything that we want to point out to our kids.
But then we'll cross the street and walk between the Ward Circle Building and Hurst Hall, like we did a thousand times when we got off the shuttle. We'll walk toward the quad, worried we won't remember our finest days spent here.
And in that moment of stepping into the heart of AU's campus and gazing down the green grass at familiar buildings where we passed four years of college, everything will come flooding back. The memories will well up inside us like they never left, back after years of disuse. The walls in our brain, erected by time, will fall. We'll be an AU student again, eager with the potential of youth. We'll be lying in the warm spring sun, biding time until class. Eating at the Terrace Dining Room. Watching the first-ever Patriot League Championship banner ascend to the Bender rafters.
We'll wander the loop, past the carved Eagle, library, Mary Graydon Center. Our kids will pose the same question to us that I posed to my father. They'll ask, "Just what was so great about being an American Eagle?"
And we'll walk over to a bench on the quad, sit down, gaze around at all that has changed and all that we remember, and lean forward,
Well, to start with ...
" ... just about everything."
Thanks AU, for a great four years. And thanks for reading.
Carl Seip is a senior in the School of Public Affairs and the AU issues columnist for The Eagle. You can reach him at edpage@theeagleonline.com.
