When it comes to campus amenities, students can easily adopt an entitled, “It’s-my-world-and-you’re-just-living-in-it” attitude, without even realizing it. But the college’s purpose is to prepare students for life, and at no point during our lives will all things align for our convenience. Often, the best things — most beautiful things — take time and drag us through an uncomfortable process before we reap the benefits. One of these things is our education, and another, literally looming over us right now, is the chapel.
Stop complaining about the chapel. Yes, the one that’s covering the quad, along with wire fences, construction machinery, and overgrown weeds. College is short, and it should be. The curriculum and professors teach us to think big, and to think about the long term. How we view the college should be no exception: The school exists, not only for past and present students, but also for students to come. Past students suffered the construction process of the Grewcock Student Union, Lane and Kendall halls, and the Howard Music Hall, just to name a few. We benefit from these additions to campus. It would have been unfair to us, who were once “future students,” if the administration did not construct these needed buildings simply to please the students at the time. If they were like us, they too preferred clean quads without construction.
As we pursue careers and relationships after college, we will be faced with countless inconveniences that we must choose to deal with, either with petulance and short-sightedness, or maturity and perspective. Time is a gift, both here and wherever we go after. Treat it with more gratitude and less entitlement.
