The first draft of what will be my first column for the Daily Cal. Please, for the love of God, comment on it! E-mail me!

Hi,

New students: there's a very good chance Berkeley will make you cry. This is a tense place, run by nervous people, enclosed in a city that enshrines screaming as a virtue. Add to that the pressures of UC Berkeley, a University that uses students mostly to get state funding for research. See an Administrator looking at you and frowning? It's because he's trying to remember what these 18-22 year olds are doing at his college. Freshmen get one year of housing, then it's a dank apartment so far down College Avenue they're living next door to Mom and Dad again. And then there's dealing with aggressive panhandlers outside ATMs, looking for parking if the car came to college, finding a ride otherwise. We have a mediocre student government, horrible roads, and a course load that stings like a bath of ice water filled with angry lobsters.

Someday in the next four years friends from Davis or Santa Barbara will come down here and remark 'Why is everything so worked up?' So here's why: Cal is tense because it's always working, studying, preparing. There are so many things to read, groups to join, people to meet, that lesser men and women are driven into a locked dorm room with a copy of 'Junior Colleges 2002.'

Never forget why you go to Berkeley. I never do. There's times I'll walk down Hearst or Bancroft and get hit with the odd, strange, joy that is remembering: I go to College here. I don't want to go anywhere else. I was lucky to be rejected from Harvard, from Columbia. Possibly lucky to be rejected from MIT.

I don't want to tie down Cal-joy to the odd collection of little things, but they help. The first Fraternity party where you Know Someone There. The 8-9 times this Football season you'll get to chant 'This is Bear Territory.' Peeing in the pool in front of Hoover Tower in Palo Alto at 2 AM. All good times, and specific to Cal. Still, there's one thing more:

Cal is where you'll grow up.

There's one Freshmen Seminar everyone is made to take but no one signs up for: Adult-ing. Berkeley isn't some pissy Liberal Arts college where they guarantee housing for four years and everyone lives in a sort of High School-esque haze. This isn't some playland mockup of real life where your local activists sit in front of the Administration building for a few hours, holding Kinkos made placards and drinking Jamba Juice. It's all real, kiddos. That's really your Poli Sci 3 classmate getting dragged away from Wheeler Hall in handcuffs, and this is CNN. Friends who just graduated told me about talking with Harvard Law's people. 'We know about Berkeley,' they were told. 'We know how tough it is to survive around here.' And of the respect in their eyes.

Of course anyone can get a great education here, but students can get a great education from any place with the ability to throw textbooks at your head. There's also the world-class socializing, the sexy ladies and five or six hot guys, and a campus built with posterity in mind. Berkeley will bring respect, maturity, experience. Specifically: internship opportunities, the ability to affect politics on a national scale, a fast-track to the upper-echelons of Business, Engineering and the Sciences. Opportunities, carrying responsibilities. A ladder to the Real World, laced with often painful splinters. You're being woken up from an 18 year sleep, but being woken up by vigorous slapping.

We're not screwing around anymore, ladies and gents. The tears, the loves, the failures and successes. They're real. They're REAL. There's no more time to play little High School games of love and war, or to treat your friends like crap because, eh, soon they'll be gone. Welcome to Berkeley, and welcome to adulthood. The failures will hurt more, and for that Berkeley might make you cry. But the successes are that much sweeter. Cal has taught me and is teaching me who I am for the rest of my life.

And that's why I go here.

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