It’s a freshman’s world at UNC

This campus revolves around its youngest members — the freshmen — and their assimilation on campus. But the rest of us should keep exploring, even if we’re not expected to venture away from what we know.

I’ve been excited about senior year for a while: wearing my “I’m a senior, who the #@!$ are you?” sticker, and sitting at the top of the campus food chain.

But it’s been a bit anticlimactic, and I’m realizing this campus is hardly ours.

What would UNC be without the uncommitted new arrivals eager to join sports teams, fill the Carolina Fever seats at varsity events, rush fraternities and sororities, and join campus organizations new and old?

Freshmen are the lifeblood of this campus, and they’re in demand across the University community.

Each newcomer is a potential underwater hockey player or religious group devotee, if only they can be lured in with the right flyer or free food.

But by the time a year or two has passed, they’ve lost the luster. Each sophomore and junior is expected to have found a defined identity on campus; athlete/non-athlete, Greek/non-Greek, steadily climbing the hierarchy in whichever segment of student life tickled their fancy when they arrived.

And spare a thought for the seniors: Nine months from leaving (and not worth the efforts of the evangelists of student life), we wear stickers to fight our growing irrelevance on campus.

Wearing my senior sticker from FallFest feels a little less triumphant than I thought it might. It’s tough to convince myself that any of the freshmen rushing across campus really care “who the #@!$” we are, after all.

So we hide off campus and go to bar nights, settled in the tried and tested bits of UNC life that are familiar, doing what we’ve been doing for the past few years.

This campus isn’t about to stop getting excited about new arrivals, but the rest of us can still step up and break out of the expected molds.

And what about the sophomore or upperclassman who didn’t find their niche (or was simply overwhelmed) the first time around?

We need to help all students discover (and rediscover) new sides to this University, in the spirit of past initiatives like “Second Start,” “Sophomore Reorientation” and more.

It seems obvious – what better a time than after a year or two of experience to try something new?

We can’t have signed up for all the right listservs that first FallFest, after all.

Or alternatively, think about your own organization.

Sure, freshmen are enthusiastic, impressionable, and attend meetings just because you give out candy (or pills), but it’s probably worth the investment to reach out to older folk with a little more experience, too.

This semester, I’ll be using my weekly column to do a little reorientation myself. I’ll be examining the workings of UNC and will explore some of the decisions made within the University’s administration.

At the very least, I’ll be trying to push outside of my comfort zone in my final year here.