“I'm not a math wizard, let me just start with that,” Hadie Sowell, senior intercultural business major, said. She was preparing for what she was about to say: the grade on her first college calculus test. “I made a 27 on it, which is terrible. And I remember getting that test back. And I was like, I'm not any dumber, just because I had a 27 on this. And I wouldn't have been smarter if I got a 100 on it.” A lot of things that happen in college are not going to have any lasting impact. 

All of us think of the legacy we will leave at the end of our lives. The end of college is not death, obviously, but it is the end of an era, and it produces introspection. Did it matter that I was here? For students, there will be a time when the memory of anything we did here will decompose.

“Some relationships and some things, some opportunities and roles are just for these four years,” Sowell said. “And that doesn't make them less good or less important for your life. But they were just seasonal, you know. And so I'm not afraid to lose the seasonal things.”

Bad grades are bad, but Sowell still passed calculus. She lived to tell the tale. The same goes for other things we do here besides school. A lot of it will not impact our lives for more than a week, or a month or a year. Not every Cookout run will be legendary. We have to figure out what is seasonal and what is not. 

Life expectancy numbers tell us that we can hope to have around 80 years to forge our legacy. To leave a record of a life. The four years spent in college are only a snapshot in that timeline. How do we leave a legacy from our time on campus? The stakes are much lower, but the window of opportunity is also much shorter. 

“I've thought a little bit about this just when comparing, ‘Who was Dave in high school? Who was Dave in college, and how is he different now?’” Dave Edgren, senior business administration major, said. 

We were talking about constructing a life. College is the first time for most people that you get to build it from the ground up, to decide who you are, how you spend your time, how you want to be known. 

“In terms of constructing who I am, it's funny, it wasn't until senior year summer that I started going by Dave. So all of high school, I was David and my friends back home know me as David. It's people at college who know me as Dave.” 

College presents a new door, a threshold you have to cross. You get to decide who you are when you step on campus for the first time. You can start from scratch, but it can be overwhelming because you might be forced to start from scratch. 

When I got my roommate assignment for freshman year, there were two names I did not recognize in the email and two that I did. One was mine, one was my brother’s — the other two belonged to strangers. I’d never lived with strangers before, but this was college, and that’s what happens to the hapless, helpless freshmen who get paired together as roommates. There were strangers everywhere and familiar faces nowhere.

But on some level, every student faces that overwhelming feeling. Some of us flounder, some of us make a resounding decision about who to be, about what to be known for. 

“I think a legacy can be a much smaller and more intimate thing,” Anna Thompson, senior social work major, said. “Okay, 500 people don't know who I am, but these five really do, and I've been able to pour into them and to share my life with them and lead them closer to Christ. Like leaving an imprint on someone's life.”

The stories people will tell when we leave matter a lot more than who knew our names. People will tell stories about Anna. 

Her friend received tragic news, heartbreaking and horrible, and in the awful moments that follow something like that, was thinking of who to call. She called Anna. 

“We were sitting in her room and she's just broken, weeping, and I was just sitting there weeping with her and I didn't really say anything, but I just sat there and just cried with her,” Thompson said. “And no one knew that we were sitting there crying about it and no one knew that we were just having this little broken moment in this dorm room.  But it was so beautiful to me looking back to see how she knew she could call me and that I would come.” 

We all get to choose to be known for something. Not all college experiences are created equally, though. There is a temptation to treat building a legacy as simply stacking accomplishments, which would make it something closer to a resumé. 

“If I make it to the presidency in my club, that's gonna last me four years and then it's done,” Edgren said. “No one's gonna remember that necessarily as much as just the people you touch.” 

Some things might not be life changing, and that is OK. 

“I still have that test, I have it in the drawer of my desk,” Sowell said. “And sometimes, if I'm getting overwhelmed about something, I'll just look at it and I'll remember that feeling. Like 19-year-old Hadie, shaking in her boots about to take this test, and then getting it back a few days later and realizing nothing changed.”

She keeps it as a memento, a reminder of something that did not matter. 

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For the majority of your life, college exists only as a memory. So, the question becomes: what do you want to be nostalgic for? 

Dave Edgren knows. He was the RA of Pollard for two years, an older brother figure to two freshmen classes worth of residents. Last year, all the guys in the building wanted to play intramural soccer. So they went to Dave, and he made a team. 

“I was like, I won't play because I'm God-awful at soccer, but I will make the team,” Edgren said. “But we made the team and they were like, ‘Dude, you're on the team. You're playing.’ And I was like, ‘You realize I'm awful at soccer?’ And they're like, ‘Yes, we want you.’” 

They took the field wearing the uniform of the Pollard Pandas: a white undershirt with black circles drawn on with markers. They won, and they kept winning, and they took home the cup for lower division intramurals.  

“I remember we were taking this picture in the goal after we had won. And someone was holding the soccer ball and they brought it over to me and they're like, Dave, we want you to hold this because you made this happen. And so in the picture, I'm holding the soccer ball. And it is a silly little thing, but I think it meant a lot to me.”