UC Davis: Reflections After Graduation

I wanted to write something that was distinctly Davis, but I’m not sure why it was so important to me. I always thought that if you could write about something well and in enough detail, you could have the experience forever and never forget. But that’s wrong. Writing doesn’t make the experience.

It could have been any university, really, but then again maybe that’s not true. It’s the university I chose, and it’s the university we chose, and though I’m tempted to make some stupid pun about cows or biking or Yolo County, I don’t think that’s the point. I could write about everything I’ve done and studied here, but even then it would just be my experiences. I could give tips that make no sense to other people, or share resources that are relevant to my field but not to everyone. How is it that some people can account for this, producing content that’s both personal and universal?

UC Davis is located in an area that is literally called “Yolo County,” but by our second year everyone stopped joking about this.

Well, that’s my single favorite thing about a university. I’ve seen all kinds of ways that people can express themselves.

I was blown away when I first saw DDR, which somehow wasn’t so different from how I felt at the Miller talent show, which somehow wasn’t so different from how I felt when I encountered the best short story I’d ever read. I met someone who said coding was art, not because of the end result but because everyone does it some way that’s never been done before. And I did meet people who lived for their writing, who mined and traded metaphors like they were the most precious thing we knew (see what I did there? I made a metaphor about making metaphors. I call it a METAmetaphor.) But it didn’t stop there. There were people who really loved photography, who brought a guitar everywhere they went, or maybe did both things. I guess this can be said for all places, but college is where you can take the things you love the most and push them as far as they can go.

Outside of UC Davis, most people associate our university with cows, bikes, and farmland. While these are certainly a part of the setting, I found much more enjoyment in going to places such as our annual DDR Dance Competition, and the arboretum pictured here

What does goodbye even mean in 2016? I’m going to stick around, and I’m going to be online, and even after a short break I’ll be working in the area. Maybe goodbye just means “I’ll see you a little less.” Maybe goodbye just means “we can meet again anytime, but in the meantime I wish you the best of luck.”

My favorite experiences here were not what I had expected. One of my happiest memories is writing an essay at 5 AM because it was about “Sonny’s Blues,” and I lost track of time because I’d never found writing so perfect. Another favorite experience was in Circle K, when instead of drinking beer we had cider and talked about life. And there were a lot of frantic coding sessions that ended up being rewarding (maybe relieving is a better word?), but these are just my experiences. It’s okay if you discover that you like something unusual, like reading or writing, more than you like partying or other “generic college” things; for that matter, it’s perfectly okay if you like partying more than anything.

So if you’re still in college, I hope you make as much as you can of it and have the best/most rewarding experiences you possibly can. I know it’s cliche, so let me end with the most cliche (but best) advice I have ever heard.

“Do whatever it takes to achieve your dreams, especially if it’s easy.”

This is a picture of the Kemper Engineering Building, which is where computer science students like myself more or less lived.