Sophomore year deserves equal excitement

 Having witnessed the horrors of the inferno, Dante and Virgil emerged from the underworld and found themselves in sophomore year.

College might not be "The Divine Comedy," but this has to be purgatory.

As a second-year student, I belong to a group that has been lost to relative oblivion. We are the middle child, overshadowed by the effortlessly mature seniors and replaced by the charmingly innocent freshmen. Few programs serve us as a demographic. Freshmen enjoy the assimilation spotlight while seniors plan their departure with the help of seminars, advisers and extensive literature. Even juniors have a share in the services offered to the seniors. To bridge the gap between the beginning and the end, sophomores deserve something better than convention, something other than a textbook that can open their minds. We deserve an experience.

Much of the attention paid to the other classes is circumstantial: The freshmen are undergoing one of the most significant transitions of their lives, and I do not envy what juniors and seniors face. None of this is discriminatory: Sophomores are free to participate in almost any program they want. Entering this year, I knew sophomore status implied autonomy. We would neither be coddled as we were last year, nor would we have earned the privileges of upperclassmen.

 I suppose, in this way, college loosely reflects life - people celebrate when you arrive and mourn when you leave. The middle part is hard. You aren't greeted at every birthday with parades in your honor. Years pass, some without what seems like even the slightest significance. At certain points, "doldrums" might seem like a weak descriptor because the tedium and the monotony are actually painful. As bleak as that might sound, so far, sophomore year is a lot like it.

The newness of freshman year has worn off, and the future offers nothing but routine. The question, "Didn't I just do this?" becomes laughably commonplace. I'd like to say that I'm facing this phenomenon, notebook in hand, as any brave and lonely soul who stares into the abyss would, with staunch perseverance. But what am I doing instead? I'm escaping. I am studying abroad in Ireland in the spring, and I'm not looking back. 

If sophomore year is mid-life, I'm obviously succumbing to the proverbial crisis. Maybe that's the way to escape the doldrums. Maybe the crisis is the answer. Sophomore year, instead of being a boring continuation of over-intellectualized schoolwork, should be a year of exploration. It should be a time to accumulate experiences.

 I won't endorse the elimination of sophomore year. Besides enormous amounts of administrative legwork, the subtraction of an entire year would require a thorough reformation of age-old U.S. university nomenclature that would rival only the numbering of hotel floors in terms of confusion (Everyone knows about the thirteenth floor conspiracy, but would we convince ourselves that we're juniors or still just be sophomores?).

Truman should instead create a program designed specifically for sophomores that encourages or perhaps mandates students to do something out of the ordinary. It would be an enrichment program that pushes them to escape academic isolation. This could include an internship, a study abroad experience, an attempt at entrepreneurship or, hopefully, something completely original. The point is experience. The means is the end, which I know is part of the professed philosophy of a liberal arts university, but alternating the means may be just as important.

The program would serve a dual purpose, activating parts of the mind that would be otherwise dormant in an environment dominated by theories and "-isms" and preventing intellectual stagnation. After an experience like that, maybe I can finally enter Paradise.

Connor Stangler is a sophomore English and history major from Columbia, Mo.