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Monday, August 29, 2005
The 22-year-old Freshman
I was embarrassed to own a car today. This morning the campus of USF looked like a used car lot from hell. It was, after all, the first day of classes and the single most attended day of the semester (aside from exam periods maybe). I experienced this problem at UNC-Wilmington for the past four years so it is nothing new, although at a school roughly two and a half times the size in terms of students the parking situation is a bit more obvious. I was warned by a returning student during the anthropology orientation that I shouldn’t expect to arrive for a class even half an hour prior and expect to get a decent parking spot, let alone one within comfortable walking distance from the desired classroom building. That student was absolutely correct. Although I didn’t have a class during peak hours (about 10am-3pm) I did arrive on campus at about 9:30 to meet with my GA advisor and I soon realized I was fortunate enough to find a spot in the Sun Dome parking that had to be almost a mile from the Social Sciences building. A mile isn’t a bad walk at all but the 90+ degree heat made it feel like twenty and I simply wasn’t used to dealing with parking on campus during the day. For the past two years at UNCW I rode by bike to campus and always laughed to myself at the students stuck in the incessant traffic jams during the day. Karma is a bitch indeed. To boot, when I tried to go back to my car after the ten-minute meeting I became misplaced on the sprawling campus. Mind you I never became lost, I simply enjoyed a long trek through the on-campus housing area and other parts of campus that I would normally never visit as a graduate student (the physical plant is huge by the way). I finally found my little black civic in the Sun Dome parking lot, but I was shocked to discover that the administration had actually extracted and moved the entire Sun Dome structure to another location on campus and inadvertently rearranged some of the cars in the process. I was satisfied that this was the reason for my temporary lapse in navigational awareness (again, I was never “lost” mind you). I felt like a freshman all over again.
Posted by Will at August 29, 2005 11:42 PM in Graduate School