A mouse who walked into a factory might identify with a recently arrived freshman. He certainly would know how I felt in August 2006, entering Wells Hall through an obscure side entrance, walking amidst the bustle of Move-in Day. Four years later I have the new perspective of a Belhaven University staff member, and a monkey from a rainforest canopy could listen understandingly if I told him of a school year’s beginning. Watching the life of the forest below and hearing its sounds, he would know something of the view of my fellow Belhaven staff members and me, who watch the campus awaken.

      In mid-August of 2006 I arrived at Belhaven for Welcome Week. I entered Wells and bumped and sifted my way through my new peers and their parents and approached the registration table, where I was met by a host of RAs. In a most friendly manner they probed into the details of my trip, my various interests during high school, the details of my upbringing, and other such issues as I tottered back and forth beneath the weight of my bags and boxes. It was a few months, due I suppose to the flurry of the radical transition into college life, before I knew which one of them was Josh, which one was 6’3″, which was the bearded one, and what “RA” actually stood for.

      In my sophomore year I was as an RA myself, and I was informed that Wells Hall indeed has only three floors, not the ten or so I had counted in those early freshman months, and in my new position, I was given a role in the oversight and management of the building’s residents. In addition to the obstacle of my deficiency in the knowledge of the building’s layout, trying to exercise authority in a hall in which many of the residents were three to four times my size daunted me. And as name memorization was not one of my natural gifts, offending my new residents through misnomers was a constant threat to my already unstable authority. Yet not only did I survive that first year, but I even befriended most of my residents and decided to keep my RA position, receiving a fresh resident shipment at the start of my junior year.

      In my fourth year I left my home in Macon, Georgia, at the beginning of August and returned early to Belhaven. I was a Peer Leader, a member of Belhaven’s front line assigned to receive the freshmen harvest, gather them into groups, and move them into rooms where through name games and the warmth of a friendly atmosphere, we might see their true personalities burst like kernels of popcorn from their shells, which in my group I accomplished primarily through overwhelming the newcomers with a wave of optimistic enthusiasm.
Those promises of happiness and success for the coming year of which I assured the new students came true, at least for me, and the following May I crossed the stage in cap and gown and shook hands with the President.

      I received a job in the Communication Department at Belhaven, and I arrived back at the school in mid-July, a time of year I had not experienced before in Jackson. In other Southern cities, the heat blows in like a swarm of locusts, and people bear it or fight it with cold Cokes and A/C until it moves on. In Jackson the heat comes like Noah’s flood, bursting up from the deep and falling from above, and it settles until it sits and stifles us, cracks the roads and turns them red. Out of the heat, I was guided to the shelter of my new basement office, where in conditioned air through a window I can watch others swim about.

      The summer dormancy of campus is not of lifelessness, as, when a student, I thought it to be, but rather of preparation; for over the next few days, the students will gather like flocks of migrating birds, and their chatter and frenzied movement will fill the campus. The RAs will probe,and personalities will burst from their shells: A new season begins.

      Alex Freel is the Staff Writer for the Belhaven University Communication Department and manages Inside Belhaven. If you have suggestions for the blog, email Alex at afreel@belhaven.edu.