Requirements?" I asked aloud of no one in particular as I sat alone reading an email from my advisor late last fall. "What be they?" Granted, I had already managed to ignore some of the more fundamental procedures of collegiate life. The whole Major Declaration Thing, e.g., took me a while to notice. I concentrate on taking more courses in one subject than in any other, I reasoned, and that subject winds up being my major. I didn't think there'd be any more to it. The concept of having to proclaim said affinity to some administrative bureau perplexed me. I never got around to doing it until the end of my junior year. So here I am, a senior with only one semester left, and I have all these random requirements to fill. Using the same compelling logic that had safely shielded me from the Major Thing long past what should have been my Date of Declaration, I had convinced myself that as long as my courses were culled from a wide enough array of disciplines, nobody would accuse me of not seeking a well-rounded education. Once again, the reality of the situation was packaged in far more red tape than I could have possibly supposed. I had never heard of Sector I, let alone Sectors II through VII. But most troubling to me was the presence of something called the Writing Requirement. Or, as it is more commonly known, the Freshman Writing Requirement. Apparently, there is a difference between Freshman Seminars, (one of which I took), and Freshman Writing Seminars. The difference is that the latter are mandatory for a degree, while the former are completely non-essential requirement-wise. In other words, I had no choice. In my final semester, I would be forced to rejoin the ranks of them amongst whom I had formerly wandered: the Freshpeople. Right from the first day, I got a glimpse of the kind of first-year naivet‚ to which I would become accustomed. I was one of the first people to enter the room. A guy walked in right behind me. He was a walking swoosh -- Nike hat, Nike coat, Nike sweats, Nike shoes, Nike bag. The room had one of those big conference tables. The kid sat down right at the head of it, in front of the blackboard, exactly where the teacher always sits. I couldn't tell whether he was trying to be funny or just plain didn't realize that the teacher would come in and tell him to move. There were plenty of empty seats, but the Swoosh stayed put. When the teacher did finally come in, he looked at the kid quizzically for a minute and then motioned for him to scoot over. Nike Boy never came back to class after that first day. Most of my new classmates, I soon discovered, were a far sight wiser than Nike Boy. All, however, displayed qualities I had long since shed. Their eagerness to participate in class discussions, for one thing, struck me as totally foreign. Not only do they always raise their hands when the teacher asks a question, they also can't seem to put their hands down when it's clear that the Q&A period has ended and it's now the professor's time to soliloquize. They'll keep their arms half-raised for extended periods of time, poised to shoot up at the faintest hint of caesura, eager to slip in a few final words. The contrast between their esprit de jeunesse and my senior apathy was most striking when it came time for the first drafts of our mid-term essays to be edited, with comments, by other members of the class. I was handed Bobby's essay. Keep in mind, this was only a first draft. And it wasn't like the teacher was going to grade anything based on our comments to our fellow students. So I put down a few loose comments for Bobby, nothing too harsh. My first draft had been handed off to Lenny, an intelligent young man prone to give definitive, gesticulative oratories during class discussions. When my draft was handed back, the margins were thick with notes. Like the responses on the peer-review questionnaire, his comments were extensive, precise, biting. They unmasked my draft as the half-assed, senior-spring-style attempt that it was. By the end of the semester, my relationship with my Favorite Freshpeople has blossomed considerably. There're lots of late night phone calls, sunny-day bike rides, and impromptu Ben & Jerry's outings. Actually, I'm lying. But I do wave at them, whenever I see any of them on Locust Walk. As their Big Brother, it's the least I can do.

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