As graduation approaches, I’m forced to confront the fact that I am getting older. In particular, older than my dad’s students.
The first realization of my own age hit me in the months before I started college. I was helping my dad clean the small office he’d occupied in Rush Rhees longer than I’d been alive, the walls of which boasted childhood drawings that my sister and I had crayoned. Even though I was looking at my distant past, I realized I would soon be starting a new page of my future.
“Oh no. That’s weird,” I suddenly thought to myself. “I’m about to be the same age as my dad’s incoming first-years.”
The next time I really had to come to terms with my age was the summer I flew out to Bermuda to spend a couple of weeks on the Smith’s Island Archeology Project, my dad’s yearly field school. The dig didn’t leave much time for pondering. Many of my waking hours were spent digging out squares of sandy soil in the muggy July heat, and my evenings were spent socializing before turning in for the night in the bunkhouses that the project had rented from a local summer camp.
I do, however, remember one moment to myself on one of the first nights I spent on the island. Walking back to base camp after reading on a nearby beach, I realized suddenly that, as a rising senior, I was older than most of the other students on the dig. This was especially odd for me as the last time I visited Bermuda, I couldn’t have been more than ten. Though I was ostensibly there to dig, I didn’t spend much time digging; in fact, I think my dad had to assign a student to take me down to the shores of the island to play because I was too distracting on-site. And although there were no young children on the island this time around, I realized that the student who watched me comb for sea glass was then probably younger than I am now.
As I prepare to graduate in less than a week, I’m coming to terms with the end of my brat-hood. As far as nepotism goes, I’d give it a solid four stars: Extra points for every time I crashed a history reception for free food, but I had to knock a star off for the reduced-fee piano lessons that faculty kids can take at Eastman. Turns out, those end up on your official transcript and, not to sound ungrateful, I don’t think jobs and grad schools need to know I got a B+ in piano lessons in 2009.
But graduation also means hitting another one of those weird-feeling milestones. Due to the nature of taking a fifth year, I’ve already passed the point where I’m older than most of the undergrads on campus. I also recently had the uncomfortable realization that I’m now older than a few of the incoming history graduate students. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about that one.
Is there a greater message to this story? Probably not. I don’t think that “feeling a little bit weird” is a reason for faculty children and their parents to move away instead of choosing to stay at a familiar university. But I think it’s one of those little things you might not notice if you’re not a campus brat yourself. Those little observations are part of why I started this column in the first place. And I think there’s still a lot of those topics that I never got around to covering. I don’t know any other brats at CT at the moment, but perhaps this column will get picked up by someone else one day. I think I’d like that very much.
