By Willow Cook The first time I heard about the legendary "freshman stripe" at UC Davis was at my summer advising program. "Make sure to get a bike fender," the adviser told our group of neophytes as we sat wide-eyed on a lawn near Segundo. "Otherwise," he warned, "you might get a freshman stripe." I now know that a freshman stripe is the line of water that forms on your back when you ride your bike in the rain without a fender. At the time however, I was convinced that it was a line of paint that juniors and seniors painted down the backs of freshmen foolish enough to ride around campus without a fender. As embarrassing as it is now, I carried this belief well into the first weeks of my freshman year. Even worse, I seem to remember actually explaining my version of a freshman stripe to one of my fellow novices who was just as ignorant as I was. Fortunately for all involved, I will not be going into my senior year at UC Davis with a can of paint and a paintbrush, or, for that matter, with any other of the strange notions about college I clung to during my freshman year. For the most part, I had all but forgotten what it was like to be brand-new at UC Davis until I was assigned to cover the story on incoming freshmen at summer advising. Which is how I found myself one July morning at the first wrap-up session of the 1996 summer advising program, where 140 incoming students and their parents gathered in Kleiber Hall to ask last-minute questions of Student Coordinator Jeff Luna and Staff Coordinator Dennis Beardsley of Advising Services. The parents, who had just listened to a one-member faculty "panel," were already seated, and I was poised to observe signs of awe, unfamiliarity or fear in the faces of these people filing into the lecture hall who were about to embark on a life-changing experience--college! Instead, I noticed that no one was sitting next to me. In fact, in just the three short days they had been at summer advising, the students had all formed cliques. As a group of girls passed me by to sit at the other end of my row, a strange feeling of panic welled up inside me. "I'm not going to make any friends here!" I thought, looking around. And then it occurred to me, "Wait a minute! I already have friends at Davis!" At that moment I realized that, three years after first coming to summer advising at UC Davis, the experience of being a new freshman here hasn't worn off completely. Although the questions asked by the parents and the new students were boring me in the advising session, although I can only vaguely remember the people I met at my own summer advising experience and although I've chosen my major, picked my classes and know who I'm going to live with next year, I can still remember that overwhelming feeling of newness that came with being in a place where everything was unfamiliar to me. One of my clearest memories of being a new student at Davis is the third morning of my freshman year. That morning was the first time I had set out to go from my dorm, Tercero, to the Memorial Union by myself. Although I had been to the Memorial Union with my neighbors to buy books, with my parents over the summer and with a walking tour during summer advising, that September morning I was going there, by myself, to the as-yet-unfamiliar The California Aggie to ask if the student newspaper was hiring cartoonists that fall (which, I soon learned, they were not). It seems funny now, but I actually worked out the night before how I would get to the Memorial Union on a map. Nowadays, I could probably find my way to the MU blindfolded, but on that day the entire campus was foreign to me. After leaving the MU, I had to walk around the Quad twice before I remembered where I parked my bike. I remember that trip because I felt both tentative and exhilarated. It is perhaps one of the only times I ever really saw UC Davis as it is--and not through the eyes of experience. That route was not yet the one I had taken on my way to my first college football game or the one on which I got into a heated debate on feminism with my friend Aaron on our way back from a women's studies lecture. It wasn't the place I lost my bike key, or the foggy, wet route back to a noisy and crowded dorm where I felt claustrophobic and lonely. On that September morning, I had no experiences at all at college. That empty campus was full of all the potential in the world. In my bike trip from the dorms to the Memorial Union, all I could think of was that I was a college student and that everything, everything was new. There are very few times in my life that I have so clearly felt the freedom that comes from newness, standing on the brink of potential, waiting to jump into a wide sea of possibilities. Just as I now find it humorous that I once needed a map to find my way to the Memorial Union, I laugh at my descriptions, in letters back home to my sister, of the things that later became familiar to me. I described the two boys across the hall. "One keeps winking at me," I wrote of the one who would later become one of my dearest friends. "And the other," I wrote of my future boyfriend, "seems really weird." What makes the start of college such a beautiful experience is that one has a rare opportunity to see things for the first time and, in that glance, to see with a jumble of misconceptions and first impressions. The experts helping new freshmen cross the threshold--summer advisers--have told me that myths abound among freshmen as great and far-fetched as that the Rec Hall is a big ice hockey rink and that cows roam the Quad. They say that people come to Davis believing that the milk in the dining commons comes directly from the dairy barns, that Jacuzzis are placed on the dorm roofs, that UC Davis uses 800-seat lecture halls and that each residence hall has its own bookstore. Some people come thinking that cow-tipping leads to expulsion, and the ever-popular, morbid rumor persists that a roommate fatality guarantees the surviving roommate a 4.0 that quarter (which may, in fact, be true). If you ask freshmen about their perceptions coming in to Davis, they won't tell you this though. Out of arrogance or inexperience, or, more likely, a little of each, they will probably instead feed you the newcomer's party line: They're worried about keeping up with the academics, getting classes, liking their roommate, being homesick. New students will tell you that they like Davis, that it's a quaint town and that the campus seems big but friendly. What else can they say, really? It is difficult to understand an experience until one can look back upon it and reflect. Going into college is like one great big question mark. It is the college experience, all four years of it, that will be the exclamation point in answer to that question. Just watch out for the freshman stripe. Willow Cook has retired from her summer internship at Dateline to go back to studying and creating cartoons for The California Aggie.