“I always think that at a school like this, a school of this size, one of the best things about it is the intimate education. You’ll actually meet your faculty members. You will literally be, whether you wish to or not, be thrust into a community environment. This is not a small thing considering that many schools these days are these enormous entities. The difficulty and the challenge of that is don’t fucking break up with anybody. You will see their fucking ass every day.”
-Junot Díaz on Colby College

If you missed author Junot Díaz’s excellent talk last Thursday in the Chapel, the above constitutes his astute assessment of the pros and cons of attending a small liberal arts college like Colby.
In an article I wrote earlier this year, “How to deal with awkward encounters on the Hill,” I characterized in overtly tongue-in-cheek fashion the uncomfortable run-ins that so frequently occur at Colby as something to be avoided at all costs. I even provided a guide for how to go about doing so. In truth, though, I spent much of my Colby experience perceiving these awkward situations as a boon rather than a burden.

For a lad like myself who is severely lacking in rudimentary social skills, these encounters provided me with plenty of opportunities throughout my college career to work on problem areas like establishing appropriate but not eerily prolonged eye contact with passing acquaintances and regulating the volume of my voice when I said “hi” to people. Because I was repeatedly forced to step outside of my comfort zone, I think I grew as an individual; for that I am grateful to Colby’s small student body for helping to bring my ailing social skills somewhat up to snuff.

Colby’s small scale holds students to a high level of accountability for their actions, and I used to find something admirable in that. Students cannot run from the ramifications of what they do. Napalm a relationship on Saturday night and you have to face the consequences on Monday when you cross paths with the individual in question in Pulver, and then again when you’re standing behind him or her in the sandwich line at Dana, and again when you’re both getting cups before you sit down, and then later at the gym when you both end up at the water fountain at the same time, and then again at Dana dinner…

You begin to see my point. Nobody makes the argument that Colby, or any other comparably sized liberal arts college, in any way resembles the “real world,” but I wonder what the potential implications of Colby’s sometimes socially claustrophobic environs are for the individuals who pass through this institution. In other words, what are the consequences of living for the better part of four years—during a period of our development as human beings so rife with mistakes (although arguably the frequency of mistakes will not reduce as we age), consuming more alcohol (for those of us who choose to imbibe) than we probably will at any other point in our lives, which of course very much contributes to the committing of these aforementioned mistakes (so the mistakes inferably will lessen once we stop drinking so much)—at a place where we’re so frequently thrust into bizarre and uncomfortable situations? Is this healthy? As individuals, how are we being influenced by this environment?

I would love to have atrocious Saturday nights without the ensuing sheepishness that one inevitably feels at Dana brunch the next morning, those mornings when the sight of someone from across the dining hall triggers the sudden realization that you had a mortifying encounter with said individual the previous night, although the details of the encounter (perhaps mercifully) evade you.

I would love to enjoy the blessed anonymity that a larger school seems to promise. I would love to not feel sullied by my actions over the weekend deep into the work week because repeated encounters with the people who witnessed my silliness continuously bring recollections of my unfortunate actions to the forefront of my psyche. Of course, if I were at a larger school I would probably be writing right now in the pages of my tear-soaked journal about how nobody knows the real me and how I wish I attended a small liberal arts school where I could walk around campus and everyone would know me by name.

Still, I would love to be able to go to the gym some Monday afternoon and not face a row of girls I’ve humiliated myself in front of, be it in a social or academic environment (or both), lined up side-by-side on the elliptical machines on the back wall like some sort of cardiovascular firing squad. In truth, they’re probably not heaping silent judgment on me while I exercise in front of them. They probably don’t care. Also in truth, just statistically speaking, I don’t know enough girls at this school for such a situation to ever actually occur.

But regardless of the apocryphal nature of my example, my point remains. Given Colby’s size, for better or for worse people get to see the real you. I encountered the same thing at my even smaller high school. You can only do so much posturing and posing, so much pretending, before your true identify unfurls itself in front of your classmates. If I could sum up my Colby College experience up in one word it would be this: exposing. Given their constant close interactions with you on a routine basis, both in the classroom and at a social level (and at the gym and at the dining hall), your peers end up having access to your identity in disturbing detail. You can argue that you can mediate how much of you those around you see, but no. You’d be wrong in thinking so.

You can’t remain in such close proximity with others for such a prolonged period of time and constantly keep your cards that close to your chest. Ultimately, unless you take a vow of silence and cloister yourself in a single somewhere on campus during the weekends, given the frightening intimacy that is the Colby College experience sooner or later the real you will come spilling out like Mel Gibson’s intestines at the end of Braveheart.

The meticulously crafted social persona you create comes crumbling and tumbling down as embarrassing incidents slip out that reveal your true character, and then you repeatedly encounter the people who saw you at your most exposed, your most naked, over and over again, now with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. Either that, or maybe I’m just projecting the personal failure of the unique persona I attempted to embody—and at Colby, best described as “athletic New England prep school graduate with secretly streetwise sensibilities and a penchant for hip-hop,”—onto the general population.