2008 Woodie Awards
RSSRemembering, without photos
From the editor's desk
By Lauren Cuoco
Issue date: 11/6/07 Section: Opinion
If you saw me on campus a few Sundays ago, you might have thought I was a new student.
Jumping into the spirit of Family Weekend, I spent hours gallivanting around Lehigh with my camera, trying to photograph every golden leaf and gleaming stone on South Mountain. Eagerly I snapped shots of our Gothic architecture and scaled our treacherous steps. I made small talk with prospective students and chatted with visiting relatives.
The funny thing is that my own parents weren't with me that day, and I wasn't giving anyone a tour. My fanatic photo spree only came from my desire to preserve some daily sights that I never take time to stop and notice. It was an intimate, personal afternoon between me, Lehigh and my trusty digital camera, until my memory card was maxed out.
Documenting life is more or less my obsession as an aspiring journalist. However, I don't think I'm the only college student who tends to cling onto moments through excessive photography and the collection of seemingly meaningless relics such as crumpled receipts and ticket stubs.
Under the pressure of due dates, deadlines and last chances, we as college students feel we cannot break free from the confines of a calendar page. We compartmentalize our experiences within conceptual units of time we all share - those overloaded, concentrated semesters. As a result, we lose sight that college is a small fraction of the grand span of a lifetime. We begin to believe these years must be the ones that really "count," leaving us scrambling to record every last minute of them.
For me, this delusion went into overdrive last semester, when I studied abroad in Florence. In a matter of four months, I endured a compact version of the phases of adjustment one goes through in four years of college: I met new people, adapted to a foreign environment, developed a comfort zone and ultimately had to leave it.
When the plane going back home thudded onto American soil, a sense of dreaded finality came right down with it. My precious days in Italy were over, and all I could think about was whether I had taken enough pictures and written enough journal entries, thereby storing my memories efficiently. If I had to let go of my time there, I needed to be confident that each sensation could still be retrieved.
Jumping into the spirit of Family Weekend, I spent hours gallivanting around Lehigh with my camera, trying to photograph every golden leaf and gleaming stone on South Mountain. Eagerly I snapped shots of our Gothic architecture and scaled our treacherous steps. I made small talk with prospective students and chatted with visiting relatives.
The funny thing is that my own parents weren't with me that day, and I wasn't giving anyone a tour. My fanatic photo spree only came from my desire to preserve some daily sights that I never take time to stop and notice. It was an intimate, personal afternoon between me, Lehigh and my trusty digital camera, until my memory card was maxed out.
Documenting life is more or less my obsession as an aspiring journalist. However, I don't think I'm the only college student who tends to cling onto moments through excessive photography and the collection of seemingly meaningless relics such as crumpled receipts and ticket stubs.
Under the pressure of due dates, deadlines and last chances, we as college students feel we cannot break free from the confines of a calendar page. We compartmentalize our experiences within conceptual units of time we all share - those overloaded, concentrated semesters. As a result, we lose sight that college is a small fraction of the grand span of a lifetime. We begin to believe these years must be the ones that really "count," leaving us scrambling to record every last minute of them.
For me, this delusion went into overdrive last semester, when I studied abroad in Florence. In a matter of four months, I endured a compact version of the phases of adjustment one goes through in four years of college: I met new people, adapted to a foreign environment, developed a comfort zone and ultimately had to leave it.
When the plane going back home thudded onto American soil, a sense of dreaded finality came right down with it. My precious days in Italy were over, and all I could think about was whether I had taken enough pictures and written enough journal entries, thereby storing my memories efficiently. If I had to let go of my time there, I needed to be confident that each sensation could still be retrieved.
