Yesterday, I was riding in Steve Cross’s Jeep through Huntsville, on our way to go buy a lot of PVC pipe and make us a barrier for the foam party we’ll have for Frosh Mosh. I turned and looked at him and said, “Man, I am so not ready to begin grad school.”

This thought has been rattling around in my head for the last week or so. I think it was accelerated Friday night at Jason’s bachelor party. At one point, I looked at PJ to my right and Jason to my left, and I realized: I am now at the age that they were when I first met them. They’re four years older than I am, so they were 23-ish when I first began to hang out with them fairly regularly. Now they’ve both finished their Master’s degrees [and PJ's already munching through classes on his way to his Ph.D. in Engineering Management], and I’m done with my BSE. I mentioned this to them, and they both laughed and smiled knowingly.

In a lot of ways, PJ and Jason were my idols as engineering students–willing to work hard but also to have fun in what they did. PJ and I lived together for a year, and we’ve worked together both in the SGA and at Teledyne Brown [before PJ left to work for the U.S. Army]. They symbolized everything that a good UAH student should be.
This fact causes me to think of the younger engineering students that I’d like to think that I mentor. [I won't mention names here, because the thought of mentoring fellow engineering students seems a bit egotistical to me.] What effect do I have on their lives? Is it as profound as the effect that PJ and Jason had on mine? Will I inspire them to ask more of themselves than just to go to class and go back home? Will I urge them towards leadership in all that they do? Or will I be like most other UAH students and spread the Gospel of Apathy to them?

As I was driving with Steve yesterday, I realize that he’s a lot like me when I was his age. Of course, he’s also very different than I was then, too. These analogies can only be stretched so far before logic and common sense tear them asunder. We both shared a disdain for the fact that school starts on Wednesday, and then he said, “This is going to be totally different for you, isn’t it?”

Yes, it is. Gone are the numbers and the equations; in their place are the logical arguments, the philosophies, the prosaic goodness that is the study of the liberal arts. This is what I should have yearned for in the first place; it is what I will delve into now.

While Steve and I were on campus yesterday, we walked into the UAH bookstore. “I want to go see how bad my books are going to be,” I commented. Steve told me that he’d just spent $300 on three books; I chuckled in remembrance. We walked over to the Political Science section, and I found the texts for PSC 500: American Polity. I already have one of them: the copy of the Federalist Papers that I’ve had since mulling rewriting the SGA Constitution. I smiled, and Steve did, too. He looked at some of the texts for future classes. “This would be really interesting stuff,” he noted.

Indeed, it will be.

I am so ready to begin grad school.