RANDY GOES TO CO LEGE Plunged suddenly into the strange, new world of the college, a 17-year-old girl is overwhelmed by her experiences of the hectic freshman week.
Curiosity, tinged with apprehension, is writ large on Randy's face as she first arrives at the college, accompanied by her father.
HEHASARRIVED-andisn't sure where. Around her is a surface of familiar things. Behind, moving up with a wisp of sadness, is her father. But Randall Warner, seventeen, of McLean, Virginia, hears only future sounds: the shiver of chalk on blackboard, closing of a book, songs sung together, laughter, papers rustling, scuffing feet on a dance floor, talk, argument, and the still disguised voices of failure and achievement. The stone walls in her dormitory are real; all else is promise. Randy has come to college. She comes not lightly. In high school she did her studies well. She was a leader, and as a leader rewarded. She was liked. Many girls are hollowed out by the sharp successes of young age, but Randy wanted, found, and kept a private self. Today she knows this self is changing just as her geography is. She has come from home and hometown to campus, and from satisfaction with early honours to a certain distrust of them, a suspicion they were too easily won, a doubt they meant much. Now she faces enormous possibilities of growth and disappointment. The college she picked is Swarthmore, near Philadelphia. It is a beautiful place and a State arboretum. It is also one of the toughest small liberal arts colleges in America. "I came here," Randy says, "because it scares me."
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A way from home for the first time, Randy feels both thrilled and anxious as she inspects her living quarters in the college hostel.
Group meetings help newcomers cast off their initial nervousness; but it takes some time before students feel they belong together. At dining table with her newly-made friends, Randy listens to new voices expressing new ideas; for the moment food is afl but forgotten.
Rigours of the
First Week and Randy is alone. College socks her with the adremJin of a peculiar institution: freshman week. It is half ordeal, halffestivaJ, and she finds it a toughening experience. At her first meal she copes with weighed words and calculated nuances. She bounces through a physical exam, runs up against a faculty adviser who gently but firmly rearranges her courses, listens almost in awe to a charming speech by Swarthmore's president. She buys books in armfuls, wanders through the biology and chemistry labs where she will be tested, and sings the earnest folksongs that are the bond of her college generation. Always crowded by people and a precipitous future, she is yet inside the web of loneliness.
A
Warned that she is "trying to leave so many doors open you couldn't walk through one," Randy deems it best to concentrate on biology during her first year in the college.
CAR DEPARTS