A month ago I saw some cute engagement photos in a library and got the idea that it would be cute and ironic if Jeff and I did ours at Whitworth in one of the computer labs. So last Friday, Jeff and I met Rachael in the middle of the day at Whitworth's library and took photos. And it was a very strange feeling. I've been to Whitworth a few times since I left for various reasons, but never really inside. I would either just drive around the main drag loop and look at the changes, or go to the Print Shop on the outskirts of campus to visit them. So, as we tried to walk as naturally as possible down the stairs and into the library, it felt weird. It felt even weirder as we got inside and headed up the labs where I spent many hours working on everything from code to art projects. It was familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. Everything was in the same place, yet time had obviously passed.
We walked into labs that I used to feel so at home in, coming in loaded down with books and snacks ready to camp out for a few hours; and now as we wandered in I realized how foreign it felt, like we were trespassing on sacred "only students aged 18-21" ground (complete with new signs about proper coffee containers, when in our day it was soda cans). We took some pictures in the book stacks that I used to know so well, but now didn't. And then we took a walk inside the newly remodeled Student Union Building (or the HUB as Whitworth calls it) and even though things were different and new and shiny, I still took a New York Times, just like I did everyday I was a student there.
And then the present caught up to us. The Computer Science department is no longer housed in the low-slung brick building known as Lindaman, but instead now resides in the shiny new wall-of-windows Science building (and I will fully admit that I didn't even suggest going to see it for fear of running into old professors who would have loved to see me, yet I didn't want to fail them somehow with the story of my life). We went and visited Jeff's dad up in the IT department (he's the Director of IT, something that he wasn't when we were there at school) and as I sat in his office, one of Jeff and my old classmates walked by because he now works there.
As a new chapter in my life quickly draws closer, it was an interesting afternoon looking back at the past. Even as I get ready to go back to school for my Masters, I know it won't be the same. At some point between Whitworth and now, I became an adult. The things that I worried about at Whitworth don't even phase me anymore. I am now more confident in my abilities, in my place as I sit in the Director of IT's office discussing the runnings of the place rather than down in the labs a floor below studying. Going back to school now means going back to enhance my knowledge of my field, not to sit and argue rhetoric like it did before. It means going back with long-term goals firmly in place and reachable.
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