Being a midyear seems to carry something of the same stigma in the Brandeis administration that alcoholics carry with them at all times.
Hello, my name is Kate. I am a Brandeis midyear. I will graduate in May 2007, even though I started school a semester after my classmates. I am not a member of the class of 2008, nor will I ever be. My parents won't pay for it. Brandeis admitted me, invited me to an orientation in June when no students were on campus, and ignored me until December, when I received my first tuition bill. I didn't know where I was living until the day before my arrival.

I was housed in Schwartz, behind the Castle. I hated my freshman year. I considered transferring hundreds of times, huddled next to my computer in my tiny, dark dorm room. I didn't leave because I didn't want to graduate with the class of 2008 at the University of Wisconsin, and I thought I'd be more miserable there. Brandeis keeps trying to prove me wrong.

Tossing midyears into the sea of cliques, commitments and classes is cruel, and most of us were miserable. Housing them in random rooms across campus with no semblance of organization was just plain mean to the clique-less and unknown students from whom Brandeis was gleefully taking $20,000.

Housing is the basis of the freshman social calendar. It is how people meet each other and how the long-term bond of "college roommate" is formed. Because some midyears were housed with sophomores and three were crammed into the natural triple at the top of B-tower of the Castle, housing was an awful experience. It was hardly the bonding period the rest of campus remembers.

Academically, we were challenged as well-in a bad way. No midyear had an advisor until after the planning period, and none I knew were given basic guidance by Undergraduate Academic Affairs and First Year Services. Course selection, an essential part of academic success, was up to the gods of chance; I ended up taking only courses that fulfilled requirements and continuing my ill-fated music career down the hill in Slosberg. And I did nothing else, because I didn't know how to do anything else on campus and I was trapped without a car. My grades were better than they had ever been in high school, but I was primarily talking to my mother. Every day. I don't even talk to my mother every day when I'm home on the farm for the summer.

I used to be loud, annoying and egotistical. At Brandeis, I morphed into this quiet little mouse in the back of the classroom, never talking in class and being generally oblivious to the world around me.

Luckily, it's not as bad now as it was when I first got here. Emily Spreiser '07, a fellow midyear, created the midyear panel to advise the school on how to help midyears feel better about their transition. The midyears that followed my class were housed together and they seem happier.

A year after being accepted to Brandeis, my social life began, in a very limited way, to open up beyond the four midyears and a transfer student I'd met at our first orientation. Two semesters of very depressing, dark and fattening times had gone by before I was even slightly pleased with the thought of school.

First semester of my junior year has so far been exponentially better than any of my other undergraduate semesters, and I'm going abroad this spring. I'm too busy to complain, and too involved to think about what might have been... at least very much.

I do wonder what would have happened if Brandeis had simply tossed me in here with the rest of the freshmen-what would I be involved in, whom I would know, and might my academic efforts have been stronger, with a different focus? Would I actually want to return to school every year? Somehow, that doesn't seem to be the sentiment among normal Brandeisians, but perhaps I've missed something. Brandeis students don't seem to foster that kind of anticipation.