The Middlebury community feels both bigger and smaller with these changes. I have met new people, even in the space of a few days on campus. These new acquaintances traveled the globe with my friends or are simply the neighbors of my old Ross hall-mates in dorms with which we “Ross Rhinos” were previously unaffiliated. When you consider how many people there are to meet each year, it is astounding, even at a relatively small school. People who were abroad all year seem to feel particularly unfamiliar with the campus community because they know, at best, only half the school. (No small feat!)

Middlebury has many strengths. The classes are terrific (I am deciding what to take from the six courses that I tried out this week), as is the food. In the end though, the sense of community is Middlebury’s best quality. Maybe it’s Vermont or something in the water, but it is hard to believe sometimes how nice people are here.

One complaint that I have heard from friends at other schools is that they do not make friends in their classes. Contrary to these experiences, I have made some of my closest friends this way. Middlebury is not socially restrictive by age or position either. While I tend to “expect the unexpected” with most things at Middlebury (to steal a line from the Village Voice), I know that I can count on meeting new people all the time. One friend recently remarked that she was almost “stressed out by the richness of her social life. There simply is not enough time to talk with everyone!”

This past week, I spent time catching up with my former professors and Commons Faculty Heads, as well as other students and staff members at the College. One of my favorite moments was attending a History Department dinner for seniors thinking about their final academic projects. Despite the fact that many of us were meeting each other and some of the professors for the first time, there was definitely a sense of camaraderie in the room. We discussed ideas for our thesis papers, and then moved on to other topics, such as post-graduation plans and making the History Department feel more cohesive. Professor Tropp brought up the advantage of having a new, central gathering space in the Axinn Center. This can only foster more connections—both academic and social—among students and also between students and professors. I have high hopes for the new academic year!

For one, I returned to find a Middlebury College that physically in many ways did not resemble the home I had stored in my brain as a reminder of my roots. A new building had come to life, a construction site that magically had become a center of liberal-arts life. In that building, a room where time appeared to be playing a joke on itself as first-year fiddled with their new iPods and Blackberries under the watchful eyes of Julian Abernethy (a reference I hope you alumni get).

But while time had brought on the birth of the new, time had caught up to those who tried to outrun it. A dining hall, familiar to all those who are proud to call themselves Middlebury graduates, fell to the chopping block, or as Matthew Biette, head of Dining Services, might say: to the tools of the plastic surgeon. However in its place students now go to a dining hall able to restore its legacy as the provider of all things delicious (read: fried), given of course that enough care has been taken to restore its rightful personality at the same time that it caters to students not looking to gain the “freshman 50.” Indeed for someone who has completely lost their sense of time it is easy get lost when trying to appreciate the death of old things that felt new and the birth of new things that feel old. Not to mention as a senior it is difficult to imagine planning for years that have ones in the tens column.

To be a little less cryptic, the campus has undergone a huge amount of change, even in the short time that I was gone. Proctor, long a safe haven to many is now open to no one (albeit temporarily) and the school is now sporting a shiny new center for environmental studies (Franklin Environmental Center at Hillcrest) and a renovated center for humanities (old Starr Library now called the Axinn Center).  For those that try to have a sense of time passing on this campus, with so many changes going on its certainly a little unsettling.

Although, because I am learning to face this time crunch I also have come to appreciate all that time has given me just by ignoring it. Perhaps what I have learned the most is in no way do things here move linearly. Time has a way of skipping ahead of itself and even doubling back on its progress in order to catch up to where it needs to be. What I mean is that as a senior I am capable of watching the clock all the way to 0, I have so much more control over how I let time dictate my life that by losing a sense of time things rely on me getting them done and not the passing of minutes.

And it is with that sense of knowing one’s own control, in which I am often happy to tell people that although I would have wanted to let the death of time happen, I feel the need to spare it; at least for just a little longer. At the very least till I decide time and I have come to an agreement on how it’ll treat me and how I’ll treat it.