“The years teach us much the days never knew.”
Chris Adkins August 24th, 2008
There is a sign on the Jewish Life Center here on campus that says “Welcome Home to New and Returning Students.” When I was an incoming freshman, I think I would have considered this sign to be edging on the ridiculous. Home? That’s back in Florida. This is Vanderbilt; this is school. After three years here, though, I can’t help but feel like it’s the truth. Last night I was catching up with one of my friends and she commented that it feels like she never left for summer. I think that’s the true indication of how much Vanderbilt becomes a home for its students. The situation reminds me of old friends: if you feel really comfortable with a person, it doesn’t matter how much time passes between conversations. When you reunite you instantly click, able to joke and talk without missing a beat.
The fact that this is my last year at Vanderbilt - my last year at home - is affecting me more than I thought it would. One of the secondary essays for the Vanderbilt School of Medicine asks for an autobiography. I’d like to share part of that essay here because I think it is a great description of how I feel about Vanderbilt.
This process continued more or less the same throughout the first eighteen years of my life, punctuated by involvement in activities as diverse as my time in Model Student Senate to being Vice-President of the student body of my high school. And then it happened. One fateful day in late March I received a thin letter in the mail from Vanderbilt. I was crushed, thinking that the thinness of the envelope equated to a rejection. Morosely opening the letter prepared for the worst, I got what may be the most important single piece of news of my life to this point: I had gotten a scholarship which, along with my National Merit scholarship and a few other community funds, would defray the formidable cost of Vanderbilt enough to allow me to attend. It was the beginning of what has turned out to be the three most exciting, rewarding, and fun years of my life so far.
Born and raised in a largely homogeneous community in terms of both race and socioeconomic status, I reveled in the chance to meet other students who hailed from all over the country, from California (my roommate sophomore year) to New York (my roommate this year). I have met students who are the first in their family to attend college and students whose great-grandparents walked the same sidewalks at Vanderbilt that we are walking today. I have met students who are here thanks to a full financial need scholarship and students who fly into Nashville on private jets. Despite these seemingly vast differences, we are all able to come together, united by our passions; whether for engineering, medicine, art, or economics, we are actively involved students. This fact has not passed me by lightly. I have come to treasure the unifying environment Vanderbilt offers that allows students from incredibly diverse backgrounds to form a community so seamless that the differences all but disappear, superseded by the commonalities that bind us together.
Along with the other activities in which I have become involved that I have described in my other essays, I believe that Vanderbilt both as an institution and as an experience has played the most important role in shaping me as a maturing young adult. I could not have asked for a better past three years and hope that you grant me the opportunity to continue to grow as a person and as a physician here for the next four.
That I would devote such a large part of my autobiography to Vanderbilt is telling. This place has come to be so much more than just school; it has grown to be an important part of who I am. I hope for their sake that in three years these new freshmen can see that “Welcome Home” sign and feel the same way.
