College Town

This past Saturday, I spent one of my most memorable birthdays with my wife MJ in the new college town that we live in. Usually my birthday lands on a weekday and I spend it at work and postpone celebrations until the weekend, but this year May 9 landed on a Saturday, smack dab on the weekend, perfect for a party, going to a concert, going out to a restaurant to have a nice dinner with friends, spending the night on the town!......except none of that was possible because of Covid-19. But we made the best out of it. Spent most of the day walking around our new environment, from the college campus to the local downtown to the surrounding state park. And even had a nice birthday cake at home!

Asian countries that have their largest universities in the biggest cities (Seoul University, Waseda University in Tokyo, Qinghua and Beida University in Beijing) might not get the concept of a college town, but in America at least there are hundreds of towns in America that function around their main industry: education. Name-brand college campuses often have their campuses in one of these small towns so that they can have a sprawling campus to accommodate plenty of tuition-paying students and build massive buildings with laboratories and research centers. At least that's how it was at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I went. It's a 2 hour drive from Chicago, the nearest city, and a little further to St. Louis, but in between is plenty of open road, soybean fields, and farms and pasture animals before you get to the twin cities of Urbana and Champaign. There was a whole bus system to get around to different areas of campus, a quaint downtown patch with local dive bars frequented mostly by college students, and for 3 or 4 years while attending college that becomes the world the students live in. It's similar to the feeling of going to a boarding school or like when Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts every school year, like its own little world and ecosystem that is separate from the outside world; it's like no one in the town is doing anything besides attending school, or teaching classes. Most college towns across America have this same vibe: from Durham, North Carolina to Ithaca, NY, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Gainesville, FL... they're not famous for tech companies or huge megalopolises or federal sites or entertainment venues, but everyone knows them because of the university that is inhabited there.

I also had the pleasure of attending an urban campus at the University of Southern California in downtown LA, so I can say for sure that the vibe is different. I didn't realize how much I would value the memories of attending a college town until I arrived at another college town some 11 years later.......there is just one Costco that everyone goes to, some local bakeries named after the first name of the owner (MJ found a vegan bakery that did not drop off in taste from a normal bakery. By the way, Beyond Meat stock is way up! I might look back at this stock currently at 133 bucks a share, 10 years later like I do with AMZN and wonder why I didn't follow my own advice back then and buy more. plant-based meat is very popular with millenials and the newer generation, especially with the current environmental crisis and Covid crisis causing a drop in meat production.). The campus is built with student-friendly dorms where one can literally roll out of bed and get to class (although, that might not be necessary for a while) built with the Harry Potter sentiment in mind, as there is a dorm unit called "the Hollows." Jogging around campus can yield encounters with many fresh-faced students, and there's an energy of learning and excitement abound, whereas when I go to work in crowded New York and Los Angeles office parks there's a reluctant energy of doing it because you have to, the jilted feeling of adulthood and reality setting in and "this might just be the rest of my life." Unfortunately for college towns, the excitement is party generated by the fact this world is likely temporary, that there will be more adventures to head off to after the exalted and hyped up graduation, and life will continue, but for now they can enjoy this world away from everything else.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan