My first day of classes was as follows. I studied at the University of Toronto and, being from Toronto, lived at home while doing so.
I kind of remember the day as if in a dream. I think I woke up early and full of forward-thinking enthusiasm, and caught the subway in North York to get to Bloor-Yonge, a central interchange station in downtown Toronto. I remember looking Westward down Yonge Street on getting out of the subway station and seeing an optimistic “vanilla sky” down the street in the direction of the campus. I then walked to the St. George Campus and to my first course (Ancient Greek), which if memory serves me well was in one of the rooms of University College / Hart House.
As I went in, I would have had some expectation of the kind of socialization I had had in high school. However, the assembled students didn’t really greet me. I looked around and didn’t feel like talking to anyone in particular. The professor introduced himself and started the lecture. This initiated a four-year university career during which my socialization with other students was rather limited.
Prior to that, I had gone to an opening convocation ceremony in Convocation Hall (a giant rotunda where we would graduate four years later). A mass of us, jeans-clad students, were welcomed by a group of gown-wearing professors.
I did not participate in “frosh week”, which didn’t attract me in any way. From the pictures advertising it, I got the impression that it was mostly about horseplay, possibly even involving the hazing of freshmen by older students.
I remember my very first class. It was an introduction to philosophy, which feels like such a cliche as I look back. I guess all the sensible places to put it were full, so it was held in the civil engineering building. I walked past a bunch of photos of dams and bridges and pipelines and such three days a week so I could go talk about Plato.
My small college had a 2 or 3 day freshman orientation before classes began. In my main memory from the first day, I was at one of the scheduled events outside and the instructor started preparing everyone to do I-shit-you-not “trust falls”. It was that moment it hit me that this wasn’t high school, I was paying to be there, and I didn’t have to put up with that crap if I didn’t want to. So without a word I walked away.
There was a mystery at my school that was to my huge advantage that never made much sense. There were traditional dorms embedded in the central campus, but they had just built five apartment buildings immediately adjacent. Each building had four suites (two per floor). Each suite had four bedrooms, two bathrooms (both with showers, one with a full-sized tub), a common area with a couch, and a kitchenette. Each 425 square foot bedroom was designed for two people, with two beds, two desks, and two closets. First year that they were available. (No premium cost over the old dorms.) Seems like they would be considered plum housing reserved for upperclassmen. But I was assigned to one as a Freshman. And I didn’t have a roommate, and neither did anyone else in the suite. All four years that I was there I was in one of those suites or another and never had a roommate and neither did anyone else. Sometimes a room wasn’t even used. Why build the new expensive housing if you aren’t going to fill it? (Students in the old dorms did have roommates. And communal bathrooms/showers.)
When doing the paperwork for attending you had to fill out a questionnaire about habits and personality that seemed to be intended to try to match you with a compatible roommate. I don’t know what I wrote that made them decide to make me one of the handful with the best accomodations available. Maybe it was just dumb luck.
The doors were steel with electronic key cards, one door to get into the apartment building, one to get into the suite, and one to get into the bedroom. I can still hear the beeps and clicks and thumps that the doors made 30 years later.
I regret not having a more “conventional” college experience. I went to a University in my home town, just a few blocks from my high school, so I’d already been hanging out on campus for years. And most of my high school friends went there, too, so I didn’t need to meet anyone new. Living on my own was fun, but the actual college experience felt much more like an extension of high school than it did for most of you.