A&T diverse student body comes from all over the world to study, socialize, eat and live together. While the places we come from we call home, A&T is where we long to be. Being at A&T for some, freshman especially, is a liberating experience and the freedom induces a high they fiend for during breaks.
The dorms may lack the amenities of home; the beds are hard, the food is nothing to write home about and damned if they don’t take away co-ed visitation within the first month.
It is however, during the long hot summer months we reminisce about the snowball fight in Holland Bowl, joke about the Aggie basketball 3-25 record, and laugh about the Delta party where only guys showed up. We call school friends and old roommates all over the country to ask simply, “where you living next semester.”
Many students who have returned to A&T know what to expect and for nine months out of the year they call A&T home. For the freshman who hates all the ills associated with the first month of being here, its just part of the college experience. Know that there will be good times and bad times, but it is all a learning and character building experience.
The fact is, for many of the student body A&T is home. It is a shame that the same people who are proud to go to their hometown and say I go to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, take very little or no pride in the university itself.
There will always be complaints about parking, just be thankful you have a car; there will always be problems with cafeteria food, but at least there is something to eat; there will always be grievances with the size of the dorm room, but take comfort in the fact that you have a place to lay your head unlike the guy on Summit Avenue with the “Down on My Luck, Please Help, God Bless” sign.
Chancellor Renick and his administration have been and are still doing their best to improve the A&T experience through building and renovating the campus. All the constructing and renovating is for the students. With the changes classrooms will be more cohesive to learning and dorm living will be more comfortable.
But, there is always a but. Maybe Chancellor Renick should reconsider, maybe we don’t deserve the upgrades, maybe we don’t want them.
Students complain about the university all the time but what are students doing to maintain the university. Is it a social defect that students are programmed to destroy everything they come in contact with.
It is only the first month of school and there is graffiti on the walls, doors, desk, of the New Classroom building. There are drawings on almost every desk in Gibbs Hall. And as for the bathrooms, are the men on campus even aiming for the toilet or urinal?, and there is no reason that “Keshia give great (fill in the blank)” should be written in a stall or on a bathroom wall.
Now that the interior is covered time to move on to the exterior. The campus has become increasingly harder to navigate with all the progress taking place on campus but that is no excuse to walk across the grass. All over campus there are brown dirt paths where grass used to be. A&T has more than enough paved walk ways. If you don’t want to walk the distance instead of cutting through the grass take the shuttle.
Everyday it gets closer to homecoming and everyone will be at the game chanting “Aggie Pride.” It is about time A&T students walk the talk and for a change show some pride.
- Commentary by Brett Harrington