I’ve come to understand just how young we are when in college, and how the ranges of maturity definitely vary amongst the people here. When I came to Rice at 16, I don’t think I’d ever heard so many people tout their ages: “Oh yeah, I’m 18, almost 19..”, “I’m finally 20…” The college set (perhaps the later high-school set too) seems to always be the first to talk about their ages, chucking out their late-teens/early-20s age with pride, as often as possible. So many of my friends in senior year of high school would somehow seem to bring up being 18 in almost every conversation in some way once they hit that age (it always made me chuckle when I thought of it). But I’ve found that as people grow older, age matters less. The age-conversation was a dime a dozen my freshman and sophomore year here, as if my peers wanted to assert their independence from home and rebirth themselves as college people. No more Daddy and Mommy around! But in this last year at Rice, the age-conversations have dwindled almost to nothing. No one talks anymore of what they can do now that they’re 21 or 22. Maybe it’s because we’re realizing that we’re seriously growing up. Eighteen was just a teaser. The 20s are for real; at the end of them, we’ll be in completely different phases of life.