(Just typing that made my inner grammar police freak – and as you have experienced, my inner grammar police is pretty quiet in these parts.)

All of my friends in SLC had lives to live today (huff), so I found myself with an afternoon free and I drove up to the University of Utah to wander around and take pictures of my old stomping grounds. College was, without a doubt, the best 4 years of my life and I just soaked up all of the memories. So much muscle memory – it’s been over a decade since I sat in the Henry Eyring building and listened to Dr. Ragsdale teach Chem 101, but I knew what the classroom looked like, and the staircase in the back. The smell of the chalk hasn’t faded (even though it’s all digital now). I wandered down by the JTB and thought fondly of my molecular and developmental biology classes. I drifted by OSH (always called OshKosh) and remembered the writing classes I took where my teacher waxed on and on about the different toilets in the world and what they told us about priorities and passions. I thought I saw myself coming down the sidewalk from Ballif Road – but the dorms are all torn down now (“they paved paradise and put up a parking lot…”). A thousand memories of sitting on the grass and having lunch with Susan, “breaking into” the Aline Skaggs building and watching movies on a Saturday night, swing dancing at the Naval Science building, plays at Kingsbury Hall and Pioneer Theater, ball games at the Huntsman…

So many changes. I barely recognized the library – it had undergone some major revisions during college, and more during med school, but they’ve added a cafe and the computer lab where we ACCESS girls wrote papers on statistics is now a “Faculty Development” space.

I loved college. I loved learning – the way that my brain would suddenly click when it grasped a concept. I miss that. Residency and fellowship was more of an apprenticeship; on the job training, rather than formal lectures. Oh, I did get some lectures, but a once a week experience is different than the immersion of college.

College also represented a time when I discovered myself. I made friends for the first time, friends who got me and valued similar things. I would never, ever go back and relive high school – but if offered the chance to do college again, I’d sign in an instant.

(Photo set can be found here)