The New Academic Year Brings with It Optimism

I have always found the start of the new academic year to be a time of excitement and optimism. I think for me there are several reasons:

• I very much enjoy meeting my new students. I like to know where they are from, what they want to study, what their dreams are, and what they are anxious about. I'm annually excited for this new phase of their lives;
• I love to hear what my returning students did over the summer. I never cease to be amazed at the travel and study abroad experiences, internship opportunities, or research projects that they describe to me;
• I enjoy catching up with colleagues and hearing of their summer adventures: the family trips, accomplishments of children, and research that they started, finished, or made good progress on;
• I am the kind of person who feels better with routine, and so I find myself very much looking forward to the mostly predictable routine of the semester. There is a comfort and security for me in the pattern and linearity of the academic calendar and pace of campus life, which starts with the excitement of the new and settles pretty quickly into a more thoughtful reality; and
• May favorite season is autumn, and the start of the new school year means that in several weeks the nights will start to be cooler and so will the days!

I will admit, the last couple of years have made the start of the new year difficult to celebrate. The pandemic undermined life in so many ways. Many experienced trauma and loss either personally or within their communities, but we also saw many examples of creative resilience, courage, and caring as well.

I was talking with a colleague a few days ago who had a new child born during the pandemic, and while we had been discussing how difficult it had been to bring a new life into the world at such a challenging time, the conversation quickly shifted in a more optimistic direction as they began describing the wonders of their child starting to babble, stand, grab ahold of things, and generally begin to explore the world around them.

I've been thinking about that conversation a lot. Metaphorically speaking, we need to be like that child. We need to use the start of the new academic year as an opportunity to start anew. For some of us, like our new faculty and staff colleagues and new students, it will be a literal starting anew. But for the rest of us, it can be a renewal.

I'm not so naive as to think the pandemic is completely behind us. But, I am hopeful that the worst of it is behind us and that we can generally begin to return to normal patterns, and one of those normal patterns that I'm excited about returning to is the normal patterns of the academic year.

My hope is that this academic year is one more like the times before the disruptions of Covid-19. I'm optimistic.

Quentin