As yet another school year begins, I have a confession. I, Katie Jarvis, your humble CT writer and copy chief, am a nepo baby.
It’s not, like, in a cool way. I don’t get to have an industry-propelled middling music career and unfortunately, neither of my parents own a fancy company at which I can work comfortably as a mediocre summer intern. However, I always have a guaranteed on-campus space to study when all the libraries are full, which is kind of nice .This perk, among a few others, is something available only to a select group of students around campus. Most of us don’t even know each other, but we all have one thing in common: We’re children of UR professors, URMC employees, administrators, and campus support staff. Because of this, I’ve affectionately dubbed us “campus brats.”
Growing up on campus has given me a view of UR that is different from most of my peers. I don’t remember my first time opening the heavy wooden doors of Rush Rhees, and I can’t recall looking at each brick building with awe as I was driven into campus for the first time. But I do remember dozens of Saturday mornings sitting in my dad’s office playing Webkinz (courtesy of UR’s “high-speed internet,” a major upgrade compared to the dial-up we had at home). I remember department picnics in Genesee Valley Park, talking some poor new adjunct’s ear off because she made the mistake of asking me about the Pokemon featured on my shirt. A few times, I remember ending up in a “take your kid to work day” situation (usually when an unexpected snow day cancelled my elementary school). In these instances I would be unceremoniously parked in the back of a lecture hall with a Blue Book and a handful of crayons. I can only imagine what students felt when they came to visit my dad for an advising session, worried about whether they’d graduate on time, and seeing a kid in the corner wilding it on coolmathgames.
All of these existing memories and experiences made first-year orientation really weird. Orientation is probably the single most important week for a college student’s social life and I didn’t want people to see me differently because of my dad’s position as a professor and my background on campus. It sounds dumb now, but I was worried people would see me as some sort of admin spy who couldn’t be trusted. But I had a secret weapon: Knowing the campus layout gave me an excellent excuse to cement myself in an important friend group role — the Navigator.
Bear with me. I believe that every orientation friend group has a few important roles. For UR, a school of mostly introverts with social anxiety, the core of each friend group usually includes an Extrovert or two. The Extrovert is the friend who sparks up a conversation with their neighbor while digging in the dirt on Wilson Day, or who asks to join you at your table in Dougie when they can’t find a seat of their own.
Second to the Extrovert is the Executive. The Executive makes decisions for the friend group: whether you eat at the Pit or DFO; where to get dessert in College Town; and what do you do with that awkward time after dinner but before your weirdly-late hall meeting.
There are also smaller roles: the Host (usually has a chill RA and an underutilized floor lounge), the Adulting Expert (Laundry Consultant, always knows the right webpage to answer your urgent question), and the One with a Car (usually a commuter, but sometimes has an older sibling with a shared car). There are, of course, more roles, and the beauty in finding yourself in an Orientation Friend Group Role™ is that you suddenly become vital to group activities.
Navigators like me get an instant invite on any group excursion. Maybe your group just finished an event on the Hajim Quad and now it’s time to grab lunch, or maybe you guys need to get back to the Rush Rhees bus stop from the Great Hall. If the planned excursion includes the tunnels, the Navigator takes on the role of the indispensable Ariadne to their group’s Theseus. To my immense relief, no one really questioned why I knew campus so well. If they did, I’d shrug and say, “I grew up in the area,” like it was self-explanatory. For the most part, the subject of my dad’s job was on a need-to-know basis reserved only for my roommates and my closest friends.
At some point the campus confusion began to fade. I was no longer needed as a human Google Maps, but by then, I’d found a good group of friends who I knew would still hang out with me regardless of who my parents were. I no longer self-censored personal anecdotes to remove references to my dad’s position. By my junior and senior years I had stopped caring almost entirely, even name-dropping my dad to strangers so long as it was relevant to the conversation.
Now, in my fifth year, I feel ready to share this aspect of my identity with the greater campus community. My orientation friends have all graduated and I’ve long since been in a place where my identity as a faculty kid is only a small facet of my student experience at UR. Nevertheless, that facet is still part of who I am today and I believe it gives me a different view of campus life — and of Rochester as a whole.
Finally, to those four or five campus brats in the first year class: Hi! These next four years will be a wild ride, but trust me, they’re going to be better than you ever expected.
