To all the first years that came before,

Welcome to the beginning of the rest of your life. The phrase “rest of your life” probably seems a little dramatic, as if the moment you first felt the grass in the Branford courtyard tickle your bare feet marked a clean break from a life that came before. That probably isn’t true. But what is true is that this place will irrevocably change you. 

Today is your day. It is a day that you will write about in your journal, that will linger in the back of your mind as you shed your “first week” personas and find your community, but it is not your day exclusively. 

Today is also a day of reckoning — the day when sophomores realize that a year only has as many seconds as you can remember, when seniors begin to pay homage to three fraught, joyous college years and when juniors reckon with what it means to be at the halfway point of our time at Yale. So before offering you more unsolicited advice than has already been foisted upon you this week, I will take a moment for the upperclassmen. 

Today, I am terrified. Old age is a slap in the face — the most undignified indignity, the most aggrieving grievance that a cruel world has subjected me to. Yes, I am twenty, and some admirers might even claim that my cheeks still bloom with the rosy-cheeked complexion of youth, that vigor pulses through my veins. They are not wrong. But in Yalie terms, I might as well be an octogenarian. 

Seeing a new class inducted into Yale’s hallowed halls is vicariously exhilarating, but it is a sobering reminder of the steady march of time. Each one of us is Dorian Gray, and you are our collective portrait —a reminder of the beauty of new beginnings and the ways in which that has faded for us, a radiance that has been dimmed by gradual familiarity, a boundless potential that has been wrested from us by the choices our past selves made. 

Immersed in our nostalgia, we begin to fear it. I don’t want to be nostalgic. Nostalgia is for has-beens. I want to be excited, as hopeful for the future as each of you, bursting with possibility. But in the absence of time dilation or a Faustian bargain, nostalgia is an inevitability. Soon you will be nostalgic. This place will change you. It has certainly made me more dramatic. 

Even as existentially perturbing as your presence is, we could not be happier to see you. Most days, you are a reminder of the best two years of my life. Without you, I’d never think about how happy I have been at Yale. Some days here I was unreasonably happy, so happy I felt like I was lording it over every non-Yalie I knew, wielding my happiness as a shield to protect me from the way I felt in high school. 

The suite you moved into last week belonged to my best friend freshman year. The white cabinet. The half-opened box of Cheez-Its. It’s been two years since I thought about that white cabinet. 

Other days – the first time you realize your friend group from first-year will change, the first time you get a B+, or the first time you feel like you’ve wasted six months on a broken relationship — you will remind us of how difficult we once found it to admit failure. In those moments, remember the people before. Your ancestors. The person living in suite E42 in Ben Franklin probably cried about the same things you did. In those moments, turn to us. Your upperclassmen — the ones who are still figuring it out but better at concealing it. 

I said I resent my nostalgia, and that’s because I fear that nostalgia is all I will have in a few years. But I don’t want my legacy to be a series of memories that I look back on every few weeks. I don’t want my time to be measured solely in pictures and photo albums. Meaningful legacies are rarely so radically selfish. 

Faced with the prospect of “life after Yale,” we want our legacies to be measured in the indiscernible imprints we left on people’s lives, in ways in which we paid it forward. I want my legacy to be personal, yes, but I want it to be shared. So, when you are lost looking for WLH, when you don’t have anyone to sit with in the dining hall, when you are overloaded with stimuli at the extracurricular bazaar, turn to us. Allow us to construct a legacy as the people who helped you when you needed it. Permit us to bolster our own joy with your triumphs. Let us feel like a part of us will live on in the advice you give freshmen during your senior year, long after Yale is nothing but a memory for us.

PRADZ SAPRE is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College. His column, titled ‘Growing pains’, runs every other Monday. Contact him at pradz.sapre@yale.edu.

PRADZ SAPRE
Pradz Sapre is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College majoring in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry and the Humanities. His fortnightly column “Growing pains” encapsulates the difficulties of a metaphorical “growing up” within the course of a lifetime at Yale. He can be reached at pradz.sapre@yale.edu