Alumni

Katie D.

August 28, 2011 - 6:28 PM

My seven best friends and I are planning a reunion this winter. These are the friends I went through the University of Oregon with as dorm mates, roommates, classmates, and who I counted as my most important community during my undergraduate college days. We haven't all been together since graduation night, 2010, when we stood together for the Honors College graduation, and then held a huge party for ourselves at my house. We then graduated from our various departments, and began the process of scattering ourselves across the country.

It's strange to think of myself as an alumna, since I'm still in Eugene at the University of Oregon. Undergraduate study and my masters program have blended together in some ways, and it's not until we started using the word "reunion" that I've really thought about being an alum.

Now, like most alumni, I have college friends scattered across the country. Some are holding jobs, beginning their careers or making some money while they consider their next steps. My buddy Nathan is working as an English teacher in Japan, and loves it so much that he will be continuing for a second year. My friend Maddy, who graduated from Family and Human Services, has spent this year fighting forest fires on the East Coast with AmeriCorps. Looking at those two friends' current occupations makes me think again about what a strange and wonderful place the world is for a graduate in my generation, and how widely we've all scattered.

Most of my friends are continuing with graduate school in one place or another. I had a wonderfully diverse group of friends, with interests from medicine to art history. So now my undergraduate friends are launching into programs in archeology, medicine, international studies, and art preservation. Just imagine what a reunion will look like in ten years.

I'm trying to imagine what some of the alumni who read this blog must think. I imagine you all have friends who have scattered and found a wonderful array of life paths, employment, and passions. I wonder if you've kept in touch, and if I will manage to be a part of my undergraduate community in the long run. I wonder how many of you still write to your old professors, and who comes back to visit campus. If you're reading this blog, it probably matters to you a great deal that you are an alumnus of the UO. But I wonder what that means in your context, and what that will mean for me.

In a year, I will no longer be "just" an alumna; I will be a "DOUBLE DUCK." This describes those of us who couldn't bear to leave the UO after only one degree here. Soon I'll be taking my undergraduate memories of Eugene, packing them up with my memories as a graduate student, and launching into who-knows-what as the next stage of life. I hope I'll get to take my friends with me. I plan to. And I know I'll take these years and all they've meant.

Here's to a final year in Eugene! And to being a UO alumna, with all that means.