The University of Michigan is an interesting place to say the least. I has a heck of a lot to offer whether you're interested in sports, the arts, partying, or just plain academics. This place has it all. Aside from having opportunities and resources to give to an individual who goes here, it also provides one with a strange dynamic that, I suppose, is inherent to all of life when you get outside of the confines of college.

Michigan is very much like an Ant Farm. Lets think about an Ant farm shall we. An Ant farm is a tiny tiny thing that is home to hundreds of thousands of ants. To the ants, the place is gigantic, but to an observer, lets say a human, the thing is tiny. Michigan provides a similar type of lifestyle that one could experience if you were an ant living in the ground.

You can make Michigan as small as you want it. There are around 25,000 undergraduates here, but at the same time, you can condense that down to a very manageable size. For instance, you can join various groups or clubs, live with a set group of people, or in my case join the Greek System. The Greek system does an exceptional job of taking something that seems larger than life and making it seem small, unique, and special. At the University of Michigan it is common to become just a face in the crowd, but you can find social networks that fulfill your own specific needs. At the very least, this is why the greek system is a good thing. Enough about that though.

The fact of the matter is that while you may develop small networks and tight connections, it is very easy, very very easy in fact, to go out and find new people every single day. On an ant farm, an ant may walk by another ant and never see them again, or perhaps two ants may work together to move a leaf.

At Michigan I've had relationships formed and broken, over and over again. This isn't a singular thing...it will occur continuously through your tenure as an undergraduate at any large college, I feel. In a way, that is partly the motivation why people seek out large colleges, for the variety and the opportunities that abound from them.

The most surreal thing about the forming and breaking of relationships is that at one moment they are so integrated into your life, and then the next moment it is as if those people have fallen off the face of the planet. You literally may never see some people on this campus ever again. It is probably more painful if it is people that you had a lengthier relationship with as opposed to some person on the Diag that you've never encountered before, but all the same, this place is big enough that you can live within a 2 mile radius of another person and not see them in 4 years. Thats kind of incredible if you ask me.

The thing that I wonder about the most is what all those people are up to. What are they doing these days? But then I realize, you just do what you do and take each day as a new adventure. The biggness of this place, the smallness of this place, the relationships formed and broken are all part of the journey, part of the learning. Perhaps this is just one half of the story though. What about reconnecting with the past? What will be will be, and as a general rule of thumb, only time will tell.

This post was originally written by Teegs Mageegs
University of Michigan · Organizational Studies · 22 Feb 2007