I've been spending much of the past week thinking about Lance Armstrong. I'll explain about Lance in a few paragraphs, and for those of you who were wondering, no - he didn't leave Sheryl Crow to be with me.
I've spent the week alone and thinking about Lance partially because tickets to senior week events got sold out well before half of the campus understood that the phrase "deli number" meant that students got their tickets in the order that they checked their e-mailed link to the Web site which gave out numbers.
I'm willing to bet that the geniuses at the Office of Student Activities who came up with that idea were from New York, where muscling to the front of the line is the order of the day.
Here in New England, we're much more egalitarian. For instance, Tufts has the housing lottery system in which no matter who you are, you get screwed.
This was the other reason I spent much of the past week alone and contemplating our graduation speaker: Living off-campus doesn't lend itself to meeting friends within the college community. Off-campus means there is no college community.
Now, were I petty and the son of a fund manager and lawyer from Westchester, these would be valid reasons for my not donating to Tufts. However, I'm not petty, and I'm the son of a public school vice principal and an administrator at a local college, which means I'm not donating to Tufts because I will be paying off my student loans for the rest of my life.
There's another reason I won't be donating to Tufts, though, and that's where Lance comes in. Lance Armstrong has been a source of courage and hope to millions the world over. Lance discourages me a little bit, but only because I know that his accomplishments are so superhuman that I can't even begin to try to replicate them. Tell me to ride a bicycle through Europe and diagnose me with a terminal disease, and I'd fall apart like Lance's first marriage, or his second engagement.
Along with the praise for starting a foundation to bring about cancer awareness and increase research funding, as of late Lance has been getting a lot of flak for his personal life. I'm of the belief that the personal lives of inspirational individuals should be left alone.
Heroes are often held up to higher standards than the rest of us, who spend too large a portion of our lives dissecting theirs. Who are we to take away from his achievements due to his peccadilloes? I'm sure a lot of us will have failed personal relationships, and I doubt a lot of us will do as much for humanity as Lance.
As with anything important in life, with Lance we must learn to take the good with the bad.
This is how I've gradually come to accept Tufts. Wading through four years of lousy student life, dormitory rodent infestations, a University-wide inferiority complex, a few bad professors, a dining services pyramid scheme, a labyrinthine student services setup, Audis with New York license plates, girls in furry boots and giant sunglasses and overachieving neo-hippies, I've been discouraged by many of Tufts' superficialities.
Again, were I petty and rich, these would be my reasons for my financial withholding.
Thanks to people like Lance, however, I've learned that with Tufts' shortcomings exist many opportunities for greatness. These opportunities are the tremendously inspiring and caring professors with an undergraduate education focus, an administration hell-bent on making Tufts a school that I couldn't get into in 2010 with my 2002 SAT scores, the University-wide philosophy of supporting public service, the unbelievable learning and social opportunities available within Tufts' host communities and neighboring towns and the earnest desire of students from all sartorial and financial walks of life to improve the human condition.
I've been lucky to find a program at Tufts which will, hopefully, allow me to graduate with a master's in public health at this time next year.
I'll use all the good I've learned at Tufts to get out there and improve the lives of as many people as possible for very little personal financial gain.
Even though I'll be a "double Jumbo," thanks to Tufts' focus on promoting public service and inspiring community awareness in its students, I probably won't have the means to give back to the school that fueled my passion to make the lives I encounter just a little bit better.
So I respectfully ask the Alumni Association and Telefund to not pester me for donations. I fully expect to be broke, and I can't think of a better legacy to leave my alma mater.
