Last Thursday night, University President Jehuda Reinharz and President-elect Frederick Lawrence spoke to the senior class in the Rose Art Museum's Foster Gallery for an event titled "When We Were Seniors," a forum for the Class of 2011 to ask Lawrence and Reinharz about a variety of topics concerning their experiences in college.Planned and presented by the Senior Class Gift Committee, just under 30 seniors attended the event. According to Aaron Louison '11, the co-chair of the committee, the fact that Brandeis currently has two presidents presented a unique opportunity that he and the other co-chair, Jennifer Shapiro '11, did not want to pass up.

"The point of the event was to be able to have seniors ask any question they wanted in order to learn more about [the presidents]," said Louison, "and to ask questions that many of us really need to know about ourselves."

The first question asked was whether senior roommates had any impact on Reinharz's or Lawrence's thinking or development. Lawrence said that he had the same roommate his freshman, sophomore and junior years. Both served as residential advisors for their first 3 years and lived in the same building their senior year.

"We got each other through a variety of crises," said Lawrence. "We spent a lot of time talking about careers-what he was going to be and what I was going to be-and we went through a number of different career paths together."

When asked what career he saw himself pursuing after graduation, Lawrence, who graduated from Williams College in 1977, said that he went to law school because that was what interesting and "larger- than-life" people were doing, and it seemed to be the best path at the time. He also said that he would never have pictured himself in his current role.

"I would have assessed the likelihood of being a college president at zero," said Lawrence. "But living through my life, there were so many decisions that could have gone the other way." Lawrence said that at the time, he had dreamed of becoming a judge at some point down the road. He also warned the seniors "not to plan too far ahead, because you really can't see that far."

Reinharz, who graduated from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1967, shared that he was the first person in his family to attend college. He applied only to Columbia and was "somehow" accepted, but the transition was not easy for him.

"Today, we have orientations that are a week long, [with] staff running around you. I showed up the first day of classes on the Columbia campus and I looked around me and had no idea what I was doing," recalled Reinharz. "I had no idea I would get into administration or that I would have this job."

Reinharz changed his major "four or five times," but he eventually settled on history. He explained that he took a total of 13 courses over the course of his senior year at two separate schools while maintaining a relationship with his girlfriend and teaching soccer. Looking back, Reinharz wished that he had been more involved outside of simply academics.

When asked about their alcoholic beverages of choice in college, Lawrence recalled that on the occasions that he did drink alcohol he usually drank cheap beer or wine. He joked that he would have considered Rolling Rock a high-quality beer at the time. Reinharz replied that he rarely drank in college and is still not a drinker today. He then quickly added, "But we smoked all kinds of stuff."

Lawrence reminisced about the days when the dorms were quiet at 11 p.m., he used a typewriter to type all of his papers, and cell phones smaller than bricks did not exist.

"Without a cell phone, it meant you were on your own a lot more. . I spoke to my folks once a week on Sundays because the rates were lower."

He also described a box of letters that his brother wrote to him during college, a possession that he treasures.

Reinharz echoed this sentiment, saying, "In the old days, you treasured phone calls a lot more."

Lamenting the loss of "old-fashioned" methods of communication such as letter writing, Reinharz added, "The future is going to write your biography one day, and what will there be? A bunch of e-mails?"

Despite these feelings of nostalgia, however, Reinharz also credited students' all-around excellence in the modern day to the age of "instant knowledge.