All college campuses are home

Since Sydney ventured an anecdote, I thought I might as well.  I’ve noticed that I tend to bop through life without noticing which college campus I’m on.  If I pass a jogger here who is wearing a Yale sweatshirt, it takes me a good long while to realize that he’s not wearing a shirt with the name of the school I’m currently attending.  Same thing with Iowa or Iowa State t-shirts.  They’re all so familiar to me that I don’t really question their existence here.  And, after being best friends with Heidi for so much of my childhood, it appears that even ugly blue-and-orange Illinois t-shirts are business-as-usual with me.  🙂

I also frequently see someone who looks just like someone I know from another college campus.  I tend to do it a lot if I’m visiting a new campus–in July I’d swear the entire population of my college past had moved to Ole Miss!

As of late, though, I seem to have some validation in my hallucination.  My favorite TA from Yale has taken up a post-doc here, and so she and I met in the department hallway recently and tried to fit a three-year catch-up session into twenty minutes.  I was gratified that she remembered me and had asked about me here, and I am glad to have her here: nice to know someone who’s a bit further along with whom to chat about the profession and life in general.  And after seeing a familiar face in a campus cafe at least half-a-dozen times, I finally approached him, tentatively asked “Eric?” and learned that the trumpet player I knew from Yale was indeed recently transplanted to Cornell for graduate work.  Though he was understandably relieved to see a familiar face in his new surroundings, my enthusiasm was prompted by my relief at the proof that I wasn’t, for once, hallucinating!

Erin