It’s been 28 years since I graduated from college and I’m a little out of the college-life loop, to say the least. I’ve ventured into the depths of our local FAU campus only a few times in the past couple of years, and only to help my oldest son find his way around prior to the start of his very first semester so that he could “walk” his new schedule and learn his class locations. My boys are in an early college program at FAU High School and, starting with 10th grade, all classes are taken at the university. So, with an 11th-grader who is now confident and comfortable skateboarding his way around the university campus like any other college kid, and with a 9th-grader who is still under the watchful eye of his teachers and guidance counselors in the very hip 9th-grade building on the very edge of campus, I’ve only really mastered the perimeters of the university campus and the car line at the high school building.

So, last Wednesday, when I was on a mission for Santa to go to the campus bookstore to purchase FAU hoodies and stocking stuffers, I had to do some preliminary online research to find my way. I figured out that the campus bookstore was in the “Breezeway”. I kind of knew where the Breezeway was, somewhere near the library, and I sort of knew where the library was.

I left home an hour early on Wednesday so that I could stop by the bookstore and browse for Santa before I retrieved my ninth-grader from the high school car line. So I go to what I thought would be a proximate parking lot only to discover that I needed a blue permit to park there. Hmmmm. I drove around in large circles till I encountered a student walking by and she was nice enough to tell me where I could park at a pay meter. She pointed out the way and off I went, found a spot, paid the meter, and started walking.

I was walking along concrete paths amid the manicured grassy areas and canopy trees, toward the center of campus where I knew I’d find the bookstore. I was breathing it all in, feeling nostalgic and at home and wishing I was in school again while I walked along the solitary quiet paths. Not wanting to walk too far out of my way because I am not 19 anymore and I only had an hour on the meter, I asked another student where the bookstore was and he pointed toward another path, told me to turn left at the Breezeway, and look for Starbucks. The bookstore was right next to Starbucks. Starbucks. Well, of course.

After another five minutes of walking, I found it – the Breezeway. Holy cow! What a Breezeway it was! No longer on my quiet concrete path among the trees, I was now engulfed in a zillion students making their way up and down the Breezeway. I was suddenly the obviously middle-aged mom among these teens and early 20-somethings with earbuds plugged into their iPhones, Jansport backpacks, Michael Kors purses, and confidence in their step. Music was piping through built-in speakers that dotted the Breezeway – current music of this generation, not too loud, not too heavy, just nice.

On my way to the bookstore, I walked by or saw signs pointing to Subway, Papa John’s, a convenience store, Einstein Bros Bagels, a print shop, Dunkin Donuts, Wendy’s, a barber shop, a movie theater, a juice bar, an art gallery, a sports bar and billiards place with craft brews, a sushi restaurant…. whaaaat??

Times have changed.

I went to a state school in Tampa and, although it was in the ’80s, it wasn’t that long ago! My campus experience, outside of my girls-only dorm building, included an on-campus branch of the credit union for those all-important incoming parental deposits, and a small stadium where our beloved basketball team played (we didn’t have a football team at that time) and where “Kool and the Gang” came to perform in a much-anticipated concert. The centerpiece of our campus, however, was the Student Center: the catch-all nurse’s office, registration office (where our Social Security numbers served as our student ID numbers), and activity center in the basement where I taught paper-making as part of my work/study financial aid deal.

We stood in line at the Student Center to register for classes, pay fees, and to get/give any and all school-related paperwork, IDs, library cards, etc. We had no online conveniences, and we had no franchised stores, coffeehouses, breweries, barber shops. Nothing. We didn’t have smart phones to plug earbuds into or piped-in music serenading our walks from building to building. We actually had to go to the library and navigate rows and rows of shelves and call numbers to find books for our research, then sit there for hours and write notes till our hand cramped up. We used typewriters, correction fluid, cursive writing. Our backpacks were filled with very expensive and heavy text books, not one simple, skinny iPad downloaded with electronic books, PowerPoints, and PDFs. Our main mode of transportation was the bicycle. There were bike racks all over the place.

We either cooked our meals in the one kitchen in the dorm shared by everyone on that particular floor, or we ventured to the building next door where the cafeteria served us our meal-plan meals during set hours. Or, sometimes, most times, if we didn’t feel like cooking or if we missed our window of opportunity next door, we just didn’t eat. No big deal. My roommate and I made a weekly pilgrimage to the off-campus grocery store to stock up on whatever our $10 budgets would buy us, usually mac and cheese, bread, jelly. There was actually an entire aisle at the grocery store dedicated to generic products, and that was where we carefully made our selections and spent our entire budgets. When I’d go home for a weekend, my mom would let me raid the kitchen cabinets and take whatever I wanted to stock up my own dorm-room supply of food with. Her mailed care packages in between my trips home always included canned tuna and peanut butter because she feared I wasn’t getting enough protein.

To call home, at scheduled times so that the call would not be missed, we used the two dorm payphones in the hallway by the kitchen, corded phones that took coins; we sat on plastic chairs that were permanently parked in front of the phones and had zero privacy. Otherwise, we’d write letters, stamp and mail them, then anxiously wait a week or so for the reply letter to come, love letters from home that usually included extra spending money.

Now I go online and replenish my son’s “Owl Card” so that he can swipe his way through Starbucks and the bagel shop between classes. I help him figure his schedule each semester when he registers for classes online, and I take him to an off-campus supply store where most of his “book” purchases are actually just a card with an access code to download the virtual textbook onto his school-provided iPad, or to access a classroom portal. He parks his car with his blue permit in one of the many overflowing student parking lots, then pulls his skateboard out of his trunk and quickly and easily maneuvers his way from car to classes and back again.

He uses his smart phone to call, text, take pictures, listen to music, Google things, and watch YouTube. He does study at the library but in the modern way via online research, not via card-catalogued books and microfiche. His writing assignments are auto spell-checked, auto-formatted, and submitted online, not hand-delivered after painstakingly being typed up

on a typewriter (which usually took most of the night, some tears, and a ream of paper). His communication with his professors is done through email, not by set-in-advance appointments that always started with a wait in a stale fabric chair in the hallway outside of the prof’s office door.

I finally made it into the bookstore, browsed a little, then quickly found the hoodie and stocking stuffers that Santa sent me there for. As I stood in line to pay, I took in all of these contemporary college-life conveniences and studied these young college kids on their way to their bright futures. I smiled to myself, knowing that although these kids have it pretty good and they don’t even know it, I would not change my ’80’s college experience for anything!

 

What was lovely about Wednesday: After my forage into the depths of the campus, I drove over to the car line and picked up my ninth-grader. The drive home included a lesson on emperors, empresses, concubines and other such things that would be learned about in an ancient history classroom lecture. History is neither my cup of tea nor my strong point, but my son’s enthusiasm and gusto in repeating history to me was the most entertaining part of the day!