The timing was perfect for me
Entering college in my mid 30s was been quite the experience. Every day I witness the vast generational differences. So many students, 18–22 years old, walk everywhere with headphones in and their faces buried in their smartphone, seemingly oblivious to the beauty that is this campus. I fear they are texting their friends who are right next to them rather than having meaningful human interaction and eye contact.
This campus I attended was consistently rated as one of the most beautiful in the country with amazing federalist type architecture and a main ‘quad’ that seems out of a movie. Every day on campus, I felt truly blessed to be there. Just walking across, looking at Wilson library or even the dreaded South Building, I knew how lucky I was to be at Carolina.
I was fortunate my first semester, in fact it was a sort of ‘pre semester’. Through the help of some great people in the Office of Undergraduate Retention, I was selected to participate in what Carolina calls its Summer Transfer Program. Being in my mid-30s this was a godsend. I met other like-minded veterans and branched out and befriended a few more traditional, albeit transfer, students. Seriously, if you happen to be thinking of coming to Carolina, check out those links, now. You will not regret it.
Even so, life as a super non-traditional student is interesting. Every time I walk into a new class at the beginning of a semester I can tell most students assume I’m either the Teacher’s Assistant, or the Professor which I never had the heart to play up for any length of time.
One of my favorite age related moments came my first semester, during German class. Unfortunately, Carolina requires three semesters of a foreign language to graduate. I had taken German in high school, traveled as an exchange student to Marburg, Germany and again to Germany many times while stationed in Italy. Taking German was the natural choice.
Everything was fine during the first semester, easy even. Early on we had to learn numbers and ask a partner each other’s’ age. We had only learned up to 20. Well, the woman I asked said “achtzehn”- German for eighteen. That was the moment I realized how huge the age gap was. I sorta giggled and she asked my age, to which I replied, “We haven’t learned that number yet, but I’m fünfunddreißig, — thirty-five.” She was one of the many young undergrads who helped change my outlook on this younger generation. While it is true that most of the average undergraduates seem to prefer their cell phones to actual human interaction, I have met quite a few that have renewed my faith in their generation. Brilliant young people who want to make meaningful change in this world and are yearning for opportunities and mentorship.
It has been a refreshing change coming to the university despite my advanced age and I would not change it for the world. Fort Bragg and Chapel Hill are only 70 or so miles apart, but could not be further apart culturally. The Army is a very dog-eat-dog world where one must perform and earn their job on a daily basis. This is a good thing, as failure at one’s job can lead to death. Even veterans eat their own. Nonetheless, it breeds a sometimes anti-intellectual, “this is how we’ve always done it, so shut up and color” mentality- very different from the academy. In my experience at this university, the inverse is true.
I think that has been the most surprising element of my collegiate experience — everyone and everything on campus is designed to help students succeed. Be it professors (while some admittedly care more about research than teaching, they nevertheless care about student success) to support staff like the aforementioned Office of Undergraduate Retention at Carolina.
I graduated. I set out to accomplish a goal and did it. As you might be able to tell, I enjoyed my undergraduate university experience but thats not to say it was not a big weird at times. Often I’ve found we humans just need to put ourselves out there; the rewards are more than we could even imagine.
