Frsehman Retrospective
By Brandon Routman
Staff Writer

As the semester winds down to winter break, I thought that it might be an appropriate time to reminisce. It was just a few months ago that we freshmen chirped down College Avenue under the watchful gaze of upperclassmen. But we are not incoming freshmen anymore. With at least a few credits of academia under our collective belt, we can now condescend to high-school seniors on their college hunts. Yes, we too were once there, a long time ago. The few months in age that separate us college students from those eager-eyed seniors belie the large gap in our psyches. They still have worries and hopes that we would find naive, and perhaps they would consider our worries petty. Consider this: before entering college, one of my biggest ambitions was to fully immerse myself in all the offerings of a liberal arts education: science, literature, philosophy, history. Now, my biggest ambition is to wake up before class early enough to help myself to some omelets with tomatoes, black olives, cheese, and mushrooms. My point is that, to some extent, we have lost our idea of the “big picture” of college.

One thing I remember from orientation was that President David Oxtoby warned freshmen to stop and look around occasionally. He said it was a mistake to put one’s head to the pavement and plow through the workload that inevitably burdens every Pomona student. He emphasized that the best route to a liberal arts education was a critical one, in which student ask the bigger question of what they want to get out of their time at Pomona. Work, he pointed out, lasts a life-time; after college, it awaits us all, perhaps even more so than in these four years. It therefore should be a priority of ours to find something we like to do, to find a passion, and to prioritize our activities according to their relative importance. Incidentally, the wise Ferris Bueller had a similar message; he was a sage whose wisdom well exceeded his years.

In dealing with this big question of education, I feel that, to some extent, we have something to learn from those lowly high-school seniors. They are still ruminating about what they want to get from college. We, on the other hand, have all but forgotten about these queries. I am beginning to realize, however, that this message might be too important for us to ignore.