Brandon Carter ‘07

Major:

English

Field site:

ABC News Special Events

Email:

07bjc@williams.edu

My semester in New York afforded many opportunities and lessons, not the least of which was how to exist as a minute particle in a city that didn’t know who I was and probably didn’t much care. Something I heard more than once during my time in the Williams in New York program was that the city had two million other people just like me, each looking for the same things in the same places. This was a painful realization initially, but the more I thought about it, the more comfort I derived from it.

Eventually, a kind of warmth accompanied the vast anonymity that the city readily supplied. I come from a small town in coastal Maine, so at times the idea that no one knew anything about me was thrilling. Outside of my Williams companions, with whom I have grown close, I was alone in a place so crowded that I could feel its strain in the subway cars or in the homeless man stranded on 8th Avenue.

When confronted with such a setting, complacency is a natural affliction that must be fought. In my personal case, the complacency nearly won. The words that sent me careening headlong on the path of indifference, however, also spurned me to action.

The idea that two million or four million or 10 million people were looking for the same things in the same places was cause, not for self-pity and despair or worse, complacency, but for diligence. In some ways I had an advantage over the people I saw every morning on the subway. Being a student at Williams and playing audience to some of the most influential men and women living in New York City was no doubt a source of comfort. But who knew when I’d be back? Three months is but a fleeting instant.

I began to pursue a course of “action” (and I cannot emphasize how easy this was) in the simplest way: salutations. For reasons I can barely discern, other than a strange sense of perverseness that seems to accompany the thought of saying “hello” or an even more casual “hey” to someone you have never met before have but seen hundreds of times in your classes, greeting other people is a courtesy that is sorely lacking on the Williams campus.

I learned that other forms of socializing were of course necessary to establish meaningful connections in the city, but that those forms would always remain beyond my grasp unless I learned how to say “hello.” The professional world, an unyielding source of anxiety for students here at the College, can certainly be hard to crack. One of the advantages of a place like Williams is that it is easier to hone such elementary social skills in a place where everyone has seen everyone.

My semester in New York City placed me in the company of men and women with whom I felt I had no business meeting. Nonetheless, I made countless connections that are now at my disposal. But value also exists in talking to someone just to talk to them, not because you think they can help you get that job at Morgan Stanley or because you think they might know somebody who knows somebody that might want to read your novel.

You perform a social service every time you bestow a kind word on someone you don’t know. They tell you that these kinds of social services make you a better person and while I’m not sure if that is true, a small liberal arts college in the shadow of the rolling purple mountains seems like as a good a place as any to experiment.

And if it is true, then the very notion of the liberal arts college, an institution that claims to produce overall good people, is represented in the small, seemingly meaningless greeting. So the next time you see that person in your class (and you know exactly who I’m talking about) do yourself a favor and say “hello.”

exerpted from the Williams Record 2/22/06