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Campus Life - Letters from Ohio State University
Seeing off the seniors
By Akio Iijima
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大学生活締めくくる伝統行事
オハイオ州立大学の4年生は、6月に卒業を迎えます。大学でのきつい学業生活から解放された卒業生たちは、大学生活最後のイベントとして、学内を通る街の目抜き通りに繰り出し、バーをはしごして、卒業を祝います。これが "Senior Crawl" と呼ばれるオハイオ州立大の伝統行事なのです。
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"Senior Crawl" に参加した4年生の多くは、Tシャツに寄せ書きをしてもらう。"I made it to every bar on campus" は「学内のバーをすべて回った」という意味
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The academic year at the Ohio State University (OSU) ends in June, a month after most other colleges, and so the beginning of summer is a time of farewell to the friends that you made in college, as well as the beginning of a new stage in your life.
Graduating seniors are, for the most part, happy that their demanding studies have ended. Some look forward to beginning a job. Others relax and enjoy their last summer break before graduate school. Still others are working part-time to make ends meet, and barely have time to celebrate their graduation. There are even some people who get married as soon as they have graduated.
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Tシャツにバーをリストアップし、回った個所にチェックを入れてもらう学生も
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For all these graduating students, the Senior Crawl is the last of the OSU traditions, the finale of college life. Graduating seniors finish their final exams a week earlier than the rest of the students, which means they have one less week to complete all academic work, including research papers. But in reward for all the hard work in a short space of time, there is a large blast waiting for them at the end.
After all the exams are over, graduating students march out onto the main street of Columbus that runs through the campus. They go to as many bars as possible to celebrate the joys of graduation with their most intimate friends, with whom they have been through the many highs and lows of university life.
Most of them wear white T-shirts and ask their friends to write a message for them on their T-shirts. By the end of the night, their white T-shirts are colorful with decoration from all the personal messages. Sometimes students have a list of bars on their T-shirts, ticking each one off as they leave it.
Although it is called the Senior Crawl, there are crowds of non-graduating students who participate too, either there to toast their friends who are graduating, or merely because they want to go out and drink.
Although it is called a "crawl," most students do not drink themselves to the point where they can't walk properly. In the United States, it is less acceptable to be trashed in public than in Japan where you often see people in business suits dead drunk on the streets. Unless they drink at a party held at home, most Americans do not drink themselves helpless in bar after bar. It is, in reality, bar-hopping rather than bar-crawling, so that the students' last college experience becomes more than just drinking.
While this is a time of celebration, it is also a time for me to say goodbye to my good friends who are graduating and leaving town. Many of my other friends who are still in school are also leaving campus for home or for a summer internship. Not all my friends will leave, but still the beginning of summer will be a quiet time for me.
The heat of summer keeps the campus quiet, too. The mugginess of the inland summer makes an appearance, as if it were waiting to take the place of all the people who have left. The awful heat
forces people to stay inside with their air conditioning to keep them cool. People do not enjoy the sun in summer here, as they do in spring. Ohio's summer makes people tired and inactive.
The cheerful atmosphere brought on by the warm spring reaches its height at the Senior Crawl, and it quickly disappears after graduation. I have always been the one who remains on campus and sees off graduating seniors, so the pleasures of the Senior Crawl and graduation are, though fun, a prelude to a summer of solitude.
Shukan ST: Aug. 1, 2003
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