Dear new Brown student Ian,
Hey, get ready for a great time. These next four years (don't make it any more than that unless you can convince Mom and Dad to fork out some more moolah) will be essential to your development as a well-rounded person. Okay, enough of the phony pseudo-intellectual junk.
You'll change your major twice, you'll take a glassblowing class at RISD and singe your eyelashes, you'll show up to a Sex Power God party wearing nothing but plastic wrap and then see your picture on the Internet, you'll write sports columns that are less coherent than economics lectures, you'll go on Spring Break and almost lose your citizenship, and you'll receive a bunch of free pens at helpful career fairs.
Sadly, you will not be able recite all the sine and cosine functions from your math class. If you want to graduate with pure textbook knowledge, go to a trade school or, better yet, the University of Phoenix Online. I hear they have a better social scene on TheFacebook.com than Brown does.
You'll manage to break more laws than Buddy Cianci but never get caught, because you'll stay on the safe haven of Brown's campus.
You'll go abroad, because you need to find yourself. You'll meet locals in small towns in Europe with whom you'll talk about the materialism of the Atkins diet, and you'll then call up Steven Hawking to tell him you discovered the meaning of the universe. You'll come back a changed person, and then you'll write about it in your creative writing class. Then you'll get over yourself, hopefully.
Sometime between junior and senior year, you and your classmates will figure out (with the help of a tearful conversation with your parents or your shrink) that you went to college to find out about yourself - what you like, what you're good at and what you can feasibly do.
When you leave the bubble of Brown (read: not going abroad or spring breaking at your friend's villa), you'll realize how lucky you are to go to Brown. After you graduate, you won't be able to file for an incomplete on the grounds of fatigue. You won't be able to cite a random New York Times article you read because people outside of Brown might actually read the Times, or even the New York Post. And forget about dropping the B-bomb all the time, because to most people, Brown is a color and Providence is where the movie "Dumb and Dumber" started.
Try and figure out early on, and not after 15 all-nighters at the CIT, that perfect is the enemy of very good. In fact, stay away from the CIT at night if possible, unless you enjoy timeless caffeine-induced zombie trances.
You may make your homepage the Daily Jolt and think that the site contains all you need to know about Brown. But if you really want to know the best-kept secrets, like how to get the shuttle to take you home from the bar or how to add a class that is overenrolled, ask, listen and experiment. Who knows, maybe you'll get into a class by writing the professor an e-mail telling of how miserable your life in Buffalo has been because your sports teams have suffered innumerable losses, and then he'll ask you to come to class the next day; he's read the e-mail to the class and had them vote on your admission.
You'll look for quotes that encapsulate your Brown experience, like "life is what happens to you while you were busy making other plans," and then you'll realize that the only way you can summarize four years of your life is in a cover letter and resume.
And when you graduate, it'll be just like your bris and Bar Mitzvah - you'll be a changed man. But seriously, don't sweat it, I'm sure you'll become successful and happy no matter what you do. (Sorry, Mom and Dad made me tell you that.)
Okay, I need to head out now and grab my diploma, but we'll be in touch.
Yours truly,
Ian Cropp '05
Ian Cropp '05 edited The Herald's sports section.
