Welcome Week + A Decade

Well, Welcome Week is wrapping up on campus. It's hard to believe it's time for another school year. This year is especially weird, realizing it was exactly10 years ago that I moved into Nelson Hall. The fear and excitement of being out on my own, all wrapped up together. After my parents left, I was not quite sure what to do with myself. So in true college form, I went with my roommate Traci to Sonic where we got cheddar peppers. I don't think I've eaten them since.

I still remember waiting outside Moody on that fateful day that Welcome week started. We were all waiting to go inside, having no idea what awaited us! And here's why I remember it so clearly. Traci and I were hanging out with her Midland friends. We were wearing our welcome week t-shirts like we were supposed to. The style was a little different then (does anyone else think it's sad that college was long enough ago that the styles have changed???) and everyone wore things BIG. Being the whopping 88 pounds I was at the time, they gave me the smallest size shirt they had: an EXTRA LARGE. So, naturally I had cut it off at the bottom. Don't get me wrong, it was modest and still long enough, but I had cut it just a bit too short to tuck in . Long story short, one of the guys and I were goofing around and he picked me up and turned me upside down... you can see where this is going. As the shirt started to go up, the guy that picked me up freaked out and dropped me on my head. All this happened in front of my new class of 1000 students. But I guess it's better he dropped me on my head than me flash my entire class!


Welcome week was different back in our day. Who'll ever forget Mud Day? ...The cotton in the ears, the hoses outside the dorms to wash us down! There's a lake and a new building in that field now, and mud day is no more. But as much as things have changed, they've stayed the same. There's still twister, and candle light devo. There's still freshmen scared to death, and freshmen that couldn't have come to college soon enough. So here's a toast to the freshmen of 2008- I hope you have the same experiences I had a decade ago. I hope you have days where you go to the bean (which has been renovated and is awesome!) to eat after chapel and have so much fun talking with friends you don't leave until after dinner. I hope you bowl in the hallway of your residence hall after curfew. I hope you take weekend trips with your friends, but that you also make up ridiculous stuff to do in Abilene. I hope you are challenged to connect what you are learning in the classroom to what you will do when you graduate. I hope you make your faith your own. I hope you make some of the best friends of your life. And I hope that when you leave this place, you aren't the same as when you came.

For all of you Wildcats out there, what is your favorite welcome week memory? and what do you wish for this new class of freshmen?