The proverbial "Bowdoin bubble" is in full effect. Just two weeks into the semester, I already feel like I have been here for two months. As we get caught up in routines, it is easy to lose sight of what is going on in the outside world.
Everyone knows something is happening in Egypt, but try to broach the subject with your average Bowdoin student, myself included, and he or she probably could not tell you exactly what that "something" is.
Bowdoin's ability to envelop its students in a world apart from the one everyone else lives in is striking. But is it necessarily bad?
During my time abroad, the difference between living on campus at Bowdoin and living in the "real" world was stark.
At Bowdoin, we do not have to think about what to cook for dinner or whether the stores are open on Sundays. Our primary concern, at least for most of us, is our academics. And that is just the way it should be.
Last week's editorial from the Orient encouraged us to express gratitude for the commitment Bowdoin staff showed in running the many services we rely on even during a significant snow storm. These are the very same services that help create the "bubble" we complain about.
At the heart of that complaint is a belief that the "bubble" makes for a world where Bowdoin students are detached from reality. But that detachment should not be viewed as something damaging.
When we think about our goals during our time at Bowdoin, we can boil them down to one thing: preparing for the future. Without an opportunity to remove ourselves from the day-to-day concerns of the "real" world, we might not find what we really want to be doing there.
With an opportunity to remove ourselves from the hustle and bustle of a big city, we might be able to better understand how society functions.
As a history major, I have come to appreciate the value of perspective, and with a chance to remove the immediacy of societal issues, we can gain a much more objective outlook before attempting to navigate through real world issues ourselves.
I do not want to dismiss the value of learning how to manage our lives in a busy and sometimes confusing world. It is comforting that we can pursue our passions and ultimately discover what we want to do with our lives without worrying about protesters throwing parties where we should be having class—yes, in Italy that really happens.
The Bowdoin bubble, as strange as this might sound, also enables us to meet more people and develop much stronger relationships than we would without it.
While we often lament the size of the student body because of the perception that we cannot do anything without everyone knowing about it, I would argue that its size allows us to really know more people than we would if we were thrown into a big city.
Because we live on a small, relatively isolated campus, and we choose to remain relatively close to it, we become much closer to the people who surround us.
During my semester abroad in Bologna, a city of roughly 300,000 people in the heart of central Italy, I came to realize how difficult developing meaningful friendships outside the group of students on my program could be.
In theory, with just about 100,000 students enrolled at the University, meeting new people should have been easy. But I found that, with so much to do and so many people, making new friends just was not nearly as natural a process as it was at Bowdoin.
The saying might go "familiarity breeds contempt," but the truth is, familiarity breeds connections—connections that are much stronger exactly because we co-exist in the "bubble."
We should avoid thinking of the Bowdoin bubble as something from which to escape. It offers us a stimulating setting to find out who we really are and what we really believe in when we are separated from quotidian concerns.
If we embrace the Bowdoin bubble for what it really is, you might be surprised by just how real our impact on society can be.
Next time you hear talk of that infamous "bubble," think twice before you start complaining.