If you could do it over again, would you choose Georgetown?
I sat there staring at the question.
“Well, it’s more nuanced than just ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” I thought.
No, I wouldn’t.
That sounds bad. Yes, I would.
Well now I’m just appeasing the survey. No, I wouldn’t.
I didn’t know how to answer. I don’t even remember what option I ultimately selected. I was too concerned about getting the right answer.
Would I pick Georgetown again?
No, I wouldn’t. But I’m glad I did
I studied abroad in Denmark.
We have a joke in the Voice office that everyone who studies abroad says their lives changed. They write op-eds dissecting how two cultures that seemed so different are actually very similar once you get to the core of what it means to be human. They share anniversary posts on the day they left, and they drink beer or wine from their respective countries.
My instagram from my one year anniversary from abroad got 66 likes.
Carlsberg is a very underrated beer, and would have potential to penetrate the U.S. market if microbrew IPAs weren’t king and Heineken didn’t have a stranglehold on the European pilsner.
Danes are a quiet people but have great national pride and wave their flag furiously. Americans are loud but love the American Project, similarly. Danish people don’t say excuse me on the metro. Coastal elites don’t say hi walking past you on the street.
I thought I was going to have something more profound to say with this column.
Nope.
Too often, people try to sum up the “meaning” of an experience as it winds down. There’s a natural urge to write a concluding sentence to every story, and when we don’t have that brilliant thought to wrap it all up, that experience falls flat.
When I was an ESCAPE leader sophomore year, we told first years they didn’t need to sum up their thoughts when they shared during reflection. If you went on ESCAPE you know what reflection is like. A group of freshman and transfers spanning the whole emotional spectrum sit in a room and are asked to reflect on their entire life before Georgetown in front of a battery operated candle.
You hear some interesting stories as a leader. You get a wide range of life experiences throughout the year. You hear about family troubles, broken friendships, self-made pressures, the occasional funny anecdote, and everything in between.
Yet almost every freshman wants to tie a bow on the end of their reflection. “So yeah, my life before Georgetown was pretty good,” or, “So I don’t really know where to go from here.”
I’m not saying there’s something wrong with a concluding sentence. Sometimes they’re super important. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Pretty good concluding sentence. “Everything’s Good (Good Ass Outro),” the song that ends Chance The Rapper’s “Acid Rap?” That’s a good ass outro.
Pulp Fiction, though? You end in the middle of the movie, technically. Jules and Vincent leave the diner unscathed, but Butch hasn’t even met the gimp in the storyline yet.
No need for a concluding sentence there.
I think non-MSB Georgetown students rejecting the stereotype of Vineyard Vines and consulting jobs is trite and overplayed. Be enraged by something new.
We have a Georgetown meme page on Facebook that administrators have engaged with on Twitter. 2017 is wild.
I don’t think it has hit me yet that I’m graduating.
It’s weird because I had all these things I thought I wanted to do at Georgetown.
Not like a bucket list or anything. I mean, I do still have to sit on John Carroll’s cold, metal lap, and I never waded around in the Dahlgren fountain.
I thought I was going to learn more about how government works as a government major. Instead, I realize now that the point of majoring in it may be to reveal the confusion. I had a professor who said in the spring of 2015 that the presidential nomination process follows similar patterns throughout the years. “So Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are going to be your nominees.”
Yikes.
I thought I was going to meet a diplomat or some cool foreign stuff like that. Instead, I went to Dip Ball once, but I was in jazz band.
I thought I was going to find the love of my life at Georgetown. Instead, I make eye contact with a girl I talked to at a party once freshman year as we move through the hoards at the farmers’ market in Red Square. My eyes dart down.
It may sound weird hearing this from a former Voice editor, but I enjoy reading The Hoya. Seriously. At the very least, I skim most issues.
I applied to The Hoya this semester, too. It was a joke—a way to make fun of their application process and the application processes of countless Georgetown clubs—but I thought that as a senior who has spent roughly three years as a student journalist, I’d have more applicable experience than any freshman who sent out applications to 10 clubs.
They dragged me into an interview on a Saturday morning. I wore a Hawaiian shirt, ripped black jeans, and slippers. Two of them sat in front me in the ICC classroom. They struck first, asking me about some editing mistakes in the Voice’s past. I asked them how this job would boost my LinkedIn profile.
During the second day interview—because for some reason The Hoya needs two days to review if someone is worthy of having their name grace that hallowed paper—they gave me old Voice articles to edit as a “news exercise.” Mean but justified.
After I was finished, I read them a letter I wrote to The Hoya, a farewell and thank you for considering me as a candidate. I pitched a few stories in it, just to show that I really did have good news judgment. The one with the most potential was an investigation into the Jesuit graveyard outside ICC. Are we sure that Jesuits are buried there? Prove it.
I then reiterated that I was applying for a position I would create myself: Senior Political Correspondent.
I didn’t get the job.
There was a mulch pile behind Darnall for like a week, and I really wanted to write a Voice article about it. “Mulch pile appears on campus.” I’d get a comment from Robin Morey and interview students who lived nearby asking how it affects their lives.
“There’s mulch behind Darnall?” John Smith (COL ’20) said
Then, when the mulch inevitably disappeared, I’d tweet with a picture: “BREAKING: The mulch pile is gone.”
I recently asked the new Voice editors if I could be “Editor-in-Chief for a day” with this issue, kind of like how you do “teacher for the day” in fourth grade.
They said no.
Ryan is a senior in the College.
