As a member of the prestigious (*snort*) welcome team at my college, I get to move in to my dorm today. Sadly, I wasn’t accepted to the tour-guide position I’d applied for, which – I’ll admit – soured me for a while. Why should I be on our welcoming team, helping new students move into the dorms easily and efficiently, for free, when my school doesn’t want to employ me as one of its representatives?

I gave myself a mental slap around the head and box on the ears, and remembered that the reason I wanted to give guided tours of my school is because I love it and wanted to help others see it in the same light that I saw it in when I first visited my beautiful campus. Sure, loving my school doesn’t mean that everything about it is perfect – our bureaucracy, for instance, is horribly and needlessly complicated and some of the important administrators are really, ahem, not nice (which is putting it very nicely). But the academics and the social life on campus are incredible, and those are the most important things at school, aren’t they?

So as I unpack in my new room today and think about the fact that I might be helping lift boxes in pre-hurricane weather tomorrow, I’ll remind myself that I wanted to do this even before I applied for a paid position, and I’ll remember that when I was a first year I was intensely grateful to this group of kids who got my things into my dorm for me, and I’ll hope that someone remembers me well tomorrow, even if it’s just as a helpful blur above a green t-shirt.