Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, welcome back to life at the University of Tennessee. After what I’m sure was a grueling summer of sun and fun, you’re back on campus. Try to control your excitement. I’ve seen many of you drowning your sorrows on the Strip this past week, though, so I’m not too concerned about you finding a way to manage your grief. Remember, it’s not alcoholism until you graduate. (Appropriately, I had to pause after writing that to open a bottle of champagne for our first-day-of-senior- year mimosas. If the rest of this column is a little disjointed, you can blame it, as the poet Jamie Foxx says, on the a-a-a-a-a-al-co-hol.)

Some of you, though, are freshmen, and I would do better to extend you an initial greeting than to welcome you back. As my roommates and I prepare for our fourth (and, God willing, final) year, you are staring at a map in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed confusion, wondering what the heck HBB and SSH stand for and why we can’t just use the buildings’ names (though I wonder the same thing every semester, don’t worry.)

I would like to say that, for my part, I don’t join in the popular hating of freshmen at the start of fall term. My memory is not so short that I’ve forgotten the time when I, too, wandered around Knoxville like a lost puppy, dazed and confused (for so long it’s not true.)

I don’t sell elevator passes or permits to the pool on the roof, as was the custom in high school, and I (almost) always give the correct directions when someone asks me where a building is. Some of my friends complain that Knoxville is too crowded at the beginning of school, but I don’t mind.

I thoroughly enjoy having the town so congested it takes 15 minutes to drive from one end of the Strip to another. I like spending 20 minutes driving up the parking garages downtown, and then, upon realizing the garage is full, driving back down. And there is nothing I would rather do than wait an hour for a table at Tomato Head on a weeknight.

Really. I promise. I’m not rushing any of you kids for a sorority (or a fraternity, for that matter), so what good would it do me to lie to you? (I say that with the utmost love for all my Greek friends. I am really looking forward to PDM next week, always a good time.) My roommates and I are some of the few, the happy few, who will graduate this spring after four years of college. At this point we are supposed to have senioritis, with no desire in life stronger than blowing off school and drinking heavily, numbing the pain as the reality of our soon-to-be-future sets in.

A friend in her fifth and final year of architecture is so antsy and ready to be finished with school that I expect her at any minute to crack and run off with a bartender or join a circus. I’m not sure how my roommates feel, but at this point I’m feeling no such antsyness, because I am kind of (extraordinarily) nerdy. I am super excited about my schedule this semester and really looking forward to my classes. My professors, though, don’t seem to share my excitement. I’ve been checking Blackboard about twice a day for the past week and a half and (as of Wednesday morning) have only one syllabus of five, while knowing of only one required text. I was more than ready to hit the ground running at the start of my senior year, but I suppose a crawl will have to do.

And on that note I will have to leave you, because I’ve procrastinated writing this, of course, so I’m about to be late to my first class of senior year. I’ll end with this: To all you young whippersnappers: welcome. It’s possible these could be the best or worst four (or five, or six) years of your life. But for most of you, college will simply be, as it has been so far for me, a few years in which you learn an extraordinary amount about both yourself and other people, in which you change more than you thought possible, and in which you make dear friends. And it will be nothing like you are expecting, which is a good thing. Good luck.

Until next week mis amigos. Enjoy your first week back!

Leigh is a senior in global studies and Latin. She can be reached at [email protected].