I’m a big, huge, colossal, diehard fan of Doctor Who. But this post isn’t about that, it’s my version of giving you what I feel is the most important tip for deciding where you’re going to spend four of the most formative years of your life.
(And I’m gonna clear the air up front: David Tennant’s Ten was a phenomenal Doctor, but Matt Smith’s Eleven is my favorite because Eleven was the Doctor as I have always imagined him.) I’m not going to get into the semantics,or go on a long-winded rant about the mixed bag that I feel Tumblr has been for Who’s popularity, but I bring this up for a very specific reason.
The Doctor is, essentially, a time-traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey. He’s sort of immortal because when he takes fatal damage, instead of dying every cell in his body regenerates and he becomes a new incarnation with a new face, a new body, and often a completely new personality. This is what makes Doctor Who remarkable: every time a Doctor regenerates, the show can basically reboot itself. Even though it’s been running for decades, every five to ten seasons it’s totally reinvented. But some elements are consistent across the show’s (prolonged) continuum, and one of them is the Doctor’s time machine.
It’s called the TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space, and it is always referred to as “bigger on the inside.” That’s the principle behind it; it’s a pocket dimension that can move anywhere and anytime within the larger universe. Every human that’s ever stepped into it has commented on this: on the outside it looks like the blue police boxes that dotted the UK back in the 1960s when Doctor Who originally premiered. Yet on the inside it’s a vast control room with innumerable other rooms and corridors around it, a veritable labyrinth. There is more to it anyone, including the Doctor in his centuries of traveling in the TARDIS, can ever know.
And that’s something really important for all of you to keep in mind when you start visiting college campuses that you got into with your parents or guardians or whoever has shepherded you on your journey thus far.
Your tour guides will show you the outside: the manicured lawns, the dining halls putting in 100% effort, the shuttles actually running on schedule, an entire community putting on its best smile and welcoming you to a dry-cleaned campus. You will see your school at its utmost potential.
But try to step inside, because when you enroll and the glamor fades and the dog days of winter set in, you’re going to live here. Look past the veneer, look past the filters. Those are for your parents. Try to look at the reality, the glimpses of the day-to-day that flash through cracks in the extra shiny coat the school’s rolled on for you.
You see that tall kid trudging by, wearing his pajamas and a sweatshirt and looking forlorn? Maybe he’s a freshman who just took a test he wasn’t prepared for despite not sleeping to study last night, and found himself acquainted for the first time with the hard work and sky-high expectations and blood, sweat and tears that go into a phrase thrown around as casually as “elite academics”.
You see that almost-couple, walking together in the same direction at the same speed, on paths that lead them to brush each other’s shoulders before pulling away and glancing off in opposite directions with secret smiles on their faces? Maybe he likes her and she likes him and one of them is working up the courage to say it.
You see that haggard-looking man with two weeks’ worth of beard and bags under his eyes, wandering like a zombie with his backpack slung over one shoulder and his hands buried so deep in his pockets it looks like he lost something? Maybe he did. Maybe he was the young man in that almost-couple, except a year later he’s had his heart broken.
But then you look further up the path and see a bright-eyed freshman (I mean, it has to be a freshman, they’re the only ones who wear Tufts apparel everywhere) on the phone with their parents. Even from here, strain your ears and you may hear “I set the curve!”
Look behind you. A young lady may be sitting on a bench, still in her “business casual,” staring off into the distance as she mulls an interview gone wrong and dreads having to call home and tell her parents of the rejection.
You’re not just coming here to learn. You’re coming here to live.
Four years, kids. Four years is what you’re going to spend wherever you choose to go. You will soar higher and fall further than you’ve ever imagined. Your parents may only ever see the outside of the blue TARDIS, the doors and the light inside, freshly painted for their viewing pleasure. But you’re going to wander its corridors, lose yourself in its maze, and look for hands to hold.
As you pass each person, glance at them again. Picture yourself at each of their peaks and each of their valleys. Picture yourself graduating from the campus you’re standing on, fighting back tears as you realize you’ll soon leave your second family behind. Then picture yourself straightening and smiling wistfully as you realize how little the person you were when you matriculated resembles the person standing at Commencement.
When you visit a campus, picture yourself living there.
Because there’s one property of the TARDIS I haven’t stressed enough, one that makes this extended metaphor really click. It’s a time machine. You can choose to go anywhere, in whatever context captures your fancy. And that’s the choice that’s going to face you throughout your college experience; throughout your ride in your TARDIS. Because the right school, a place like Tufts was for me, can end its four years of whirling and spinning through space and finally open its doors and let you step out into… anything. Anything you want.
In the words of the Eleventh Doctor, “all of time and space. Everywhere and anywhere, any star that ever was. Where do you want to start?”
You will rise, and you will fall, and you will laugh and live and love and lose and regret and celebrate and, in the end, depart much too soon. But that’s why it’s just right: you will leave when you feel you’ve only just begun, and you will miss it with a fire whose intensity will be equaled only by the joy you feel for having lived it.
You will depart molded and shaped and hardened and humbled and ready. Make sure you do yourself the favor of choosing a place where you can do all of that and more, a place that you will leave satisfied yet feeling you barely scratched the surface.
Because that’s what the TARDIS is. It’s possibility, writ so large as to be infinite, bigger on the inside.
And that’s what faces you now: infinity. Choose the most perfect canvas you can imagine, the way artists frame scenes with their thumbs before ever touching a paintbrush. Breathe it in, and imagine yourself at your best under its sun and at your worst in its storms.
Then get started on living your opus.