As you’re well aware, a new school year is upon us! I’m amazed at what change happens between the early weeks of August and the end of the month. Besides all the kids heading back to school, there were 50,000 undergrads across South Central PA heading to campus. That’s like 90% of the city of Lancaster deciding to change work schedules and living arrangements within a two week window of each other. It creates some chaos!
I remember back 11 years ago, to my first few days on a college campus. I remember at the strange new rhythms of life, like leaving “home” (my dorm room) at midnight to wander across the quad to another dorm to see who was around to hang out. In high school, no one I knew ever casually wandered around their neighborhood in the middle of the night looking for snacks and a chat.
And even though this mass migration occurs every year around this time, every late summer is a little different. Again going back 11 years, I remember going through the campus activities fair to see all the various student groups, and everyone kept wanting my email address. At that point, I was like 90% of other internet users and had an AOL account, but really email was a novelty, little more. So I had no qualms about giving the address to anyone and everyone who asked, quickly signing up for about 2o clubs. A few days later, in my first classes, my professors also wanted my email, promising that they’d be sending assignments… That back-to-school season marked the introduction of email into my life, no longer as a novelty, but as a primary communication tool.
These changes in technology keep coming, marked in significant ways by a new school year. My senior year of college, when we all arrived back on campus, suddenly everyone had a cell phone! About five years ago, Facebook had some followers through the winter and spring, but it wasn’t until the fall back-to-school transition that almost everyone had an account. We see hints of these changes coming over the summer, but they’re not fully manifested until a few weeks into the semester. And so I ask and wonder–what will be new this year?
With the mass migration and the cultural changes, this can be a disruptive time for new students. Purposefully so, this is the busiest time of the year for our InterVarsity staff and students. As one staff wrote recently in an update:
Please pray with us, especially in these first few weeks of school, that the current students would reach out to the new ones, and that everyone on campus would have an opportunity to be connected to someone who is living out their faith and ultimately connected to God.
May it be so.
