Excitement fills the air as every student anticipates the new year. Move-in day is here. Students from all over the world come together from different walks of life, joining for a sole purpose — to have purpose. Students come to learn, pursue a career, and be surrounded by those who share similar passions.
Freshman enter hopeful for the future, eager to learn, and full of vibrant enthusiasm. Move-in day is a fantastic chaos of each of those emotions clashing with many more.
The unfortunate fact is, for most, this enthusiasm does not last long. School begins, coursework is harder than expected, students lose motivation and sight of what they were aiming for in the first place.
Recent studies show a horrible increase in a serious condition called, ‘senioritis’. Okay, all joking aside, it’s likely that most everyone has either personally experienced a case of senioritis, or has felt the pain of it through another person in their life.
The scary thing is, you no longer have to be a senior to have senioritis. With social media having such prominence in our current world, it is easier than ever to develop an obsession with the future stages of our lives.
Friends who are older than us seem to be living their best lives on social media, maybe in graduate school, starting a dream job, beginning a family, or simply living it up with a Netflix subscription and their new dog. Regardless of the example, the principle of the grass being greener on the other side is more alive and relevant than ever.
What does this have to do with my title as a Lariat multimedia journalist? Everything.
I attended my very first Baylor move-in just last week. My role at the Lariat is primarily being behind a camera, capturing the moments readers want or need to see most. I left my dorm the first morning of move-in, camera in hand, not expecting to capture anything out of the norm; at least from a move-in day perspective.
However, when I approached the first residence hall, I saw countless volunteers, not much older than myself, screaming and cheering as the cars of new students drove by. It did not matter to the volunteers whether this student was coming to their residence hall or moving the next; they showed genuine enthusiasm and excitement regardless.
When I first came across this commotion, it took me a minute to realize why I had never seen anything like this before. Then I realized the number of upperclassmen involved in the move-in process was far more than I had ever seen before. And not one person was unhappy to be there. The genuine excitement within these students, to voluntarily hanging out with freshman all day, carrying boxes up flights of stairs blew my mind.
The dynamic at Baylor between the upper and underclassmen is unusual in the most fantastic way possible. Freshmen are being greeted on the first day of their college careers by the classes above them, setting the expectation that here we have community, we have family, and we take the time to support and mentor each other.
Students here are content in their present. One of my favorite quotes about contentment comes from a pastor named Peter Frey. In a sermon last year he explained the pursuit of contentment is not settlement for sub-par circumstances, but rather “the pursuit of a life that is grounded in faith.”
Baylor move-in is setting their students up for success. Not only in developing the groundwork for a fantastic set of relationships to support students through school, but also in providing a Christian perspective to combat the epidemic of ‘senioritis.’
