“What made you want to attend UMass Amherst?”
This is single-handedly the most common question I’ve been asked in my two months here. My answer is always the same: the stunning campus. Walking across campus and looking up at prized Du Bois towering over our much-loved pond is always the best reassurance that I made the best decision, but recently I realized how much of the campus I’ve been missing out on. We’re always on a constant route from classes to the dorms and if you think about it, especially for large universities, every college has a lot of ground to cover with many worthwhile spots that are easy to miss.
Unfortunately, college life doesn’t allow for the time to walk every inch of campus. A while ago I heard about someone who rode the bus all day and encountered a lot of different places and people around town. The more I thought about it, the bus really did seem like the best tour of campus, and meeting new people didn’t sound so bad either, so I decided to go for it.
I rode the campus bus on a beautiful Friday morning for five hours. Though it sounds tedious (also, just… why?), it honestly was an experience that I think will end up being one of the best I’ll ever have these four years. So I boarded the bus at 9:30 a.m. with my laptop, journal, a blanket, book and headphones in tow. I was hesitant at first—I definitely thought I’d call it a day after no more than two hours—but the entire situation pleasantly surprised me.
I was pretty nervous at the beginning of the ride. After 20 minutes of not getting off at any stops, I started to wonder whether or not the bus driver had noticed something odd. I started to journal, document everything I was seeing, and listen to music. What I loved about the bus I chose was that it traveled around the town of Amherst too, which let me see more of the town as well.
My first interaction with the bus driver occurred just under two hours into the ride. The bus had done a full circle, and as the new bus driver was getting on board, the old one turned to me and said, “Are you just going to stay on the bus, hun?”
I laughed and briefly told her what I was trying to accomplish, and both of them seemed pretty surprised (I like to tell myself it was because of how creative an idea it was, but I’m fairly convinced it was just concern for a college student whiling away her Friday morning).
The first two hours of the bus ride were exactly as I expected them to would be. At most bus stops, I found myself stunned at where I’d ended up, and the question “are we even on campus?” frequented my mind. I saw the admissions office, three gardens, an athletics field, a lookout point and two entire residential areas for the first time, which seemed bizarre to me. Let’s not forget that we are also in the midst of fall, and touring a campus in New England at a time like this was very pleasing to the eye.
The last three hours of the bus ride would be best described as bittersweet. It was bitter because there were points when the bus was empty and I had been on the same route a couple times, but the positive side of this leg of the ride definitely overrides the negative. I had a lot of conversations with random students on the bus which I really enjoyed. Among these people was an upperclassman studying the same major as me, a student from one of my lecture classes who I got to know better from our 10-minute conversation, and a professor who had a pretty in-depth discussion with me about UMass in general as a university when I told him that I was riding the bus for a couple of hours to see more of the campus and the town of Amherst.
Initating conversation with strangers is never easy to do; I myself am not one to approach a stranger and begin talking their ear off. But had this bus ride not put me in a situation that pushed me to talk to strangers or pushed strangers to talk to me, then I might have missed out on three incredibly helpful conversations. As undergraduate students, there are opportunities everywhere for us to take, and if this bus ride left me with anything, it’s the knowledge that you never know where a conversation with the stranger sitting to your right could lead.
Ultimately, if you take anything from my slightly strange story, it should be that every college campus has many nooks and crannies that are waiting to be explored, and so many different kinds of people that are waiting to meet you. It’s easy to stick to what is set for you by restricting yourself to the confines of your friend group, classes, and activities. However, removing these confines and making the annoying but crucial decision to go do something that you might not want to do—just for the sake of seeing a new spot around campus or meeting different kinds of people than you’re used to—is honestly a proverbial component of your undergraduate experience.
In other words: skip class, ride the bus.