The big man on campus is small

Toward the end of high school, teachers used to counter any and all arrogance-induced misbehavior with a single promise, always delivered as a threat. We were big fish in a little pond, they’d tell us, but when we get to college, we will be little fish in a big pond. Just wait, they would say. But, while first-years in college may indeed feel like very little fish, college is still a pond, and it’s one students can grow into, and in which they can gain, if not notoriety, then at least a place on a lily pad. Students can form relationships with their professors. They can find themselves on the front page of the school paper. They can climb the leadership ladder in campus clubs. Students can still think they’re people (look at my qualine—I am clearly not exempt from this particular delusion of grandeur). Within this particular space in the limited amount of time that we have here, we can come to be big fish in this bigger pond. This is not to say that my high school teachers were totally wrong in their promise, but they predicted its impact too soon. They shouldn’t have threatened us with college, but with everything that comes after.

Life, or the world at large, or whatever one wants to call the space we occupy after we leave college, is a much larger body of water. And it does not seem to me that one can swim in it the same way. One cannot simply go to one’s professor’s office hours and get to know the other people in one’s department and join a club that has elections every year and take over in two or three and be big. Yes, to be sure, one can become bigger. But I do not think one can do so as quickly, or as easily, as one can here.

And while, in theory, we know that this is going to be the reality, I’m not sure that we—or at least, I—fully understand how different the waters will be. We do not fully appreciate that we are going to be guppies after we graduate. That we are not necessarily going to be the people running the organizations or reinventing the publication or being the greatest thing to happen to a company, and that we are certainly not going to be those people right away. Because I think that deep down, we expect to be. We expect to spend one or two years as life’s first-years, and then become big fish again. I don’t think it’s accidental or coincidental that some of the people I know who are least happy after graduating are also the people who were the biggest fish as undergraduates.

Once, I mused to a friend that I don’t think we realize how long it’s going to take to make something of ourselves. She responded by dramatically declaring that she doesn’t have that kind of time. And why would she? Why would she think that she does, when, from Convocation to Commencement, we’re told of—and living in a structure that reinforces a sense of—our own immediate greatness? Why and how would anyone spending four years like that think that he can or should be anything but great?

But she does have that kind of time. She does because we all do. We are still small, but we are also still young, and all that we do not know is all that we still have to learn. And we will learn. Maybe we’ll even come to be big fish again.

But first we have to accept that we’re going to have to be little fish for a while.

Emily Tamkin is a Columbia College senior majoring in Russian literature and culture. She is the general manager of the Columbia Political Union, vice chair of the Senior Fund, literary criticism editor of The Birch, and a former Spectator editorial page editor. Back to the Future runs alternate Wednesdays.