By Willem van den Berg
UCR Alumnus, Class of 2013
During a recent wintery sojourn to Middelburg I found myself stumbling through a Bagijnhof Christmas market, enjoying the company of some mulled wine and some dearly missed friends. As I surveyed the busy street the typical thoughts of an alumnus meandered through my cerebellum: this place is exactly the same yet feels different, I’ve changed, why does everyone look so young, and most importantly – where can I get more mulled wine? Most of these thoughts came and went, but one thought stayed with me much longer: if I could redo my three years in Middelburg, what would I change? What regrets do I have? And how can I write a Tabula Rasa article about it?
Along with this question an obvious answer popped into my brain. Namely, that I should have spent more time with my friends enjoying the good life that is undergrad. But I quickly discarded that idea for this article because I was struck by a mortifying vision of what it could unleash: guitar-playing hippies under every table in an Eleanor with an uncanny resemblance to Woodstock 1969 (including a swingers club in room 11), and an indelible proliferation of tea-drinking Hare Krishna sects on every floor of Koestraat (though this is probably a fait accompli). No, I did not want that blood on my hands. Also, everyone already knows that they should spend time with friends.
As I continued to rack my brain for any regrets, a few serious candidates appeared. Attempting communism in Baghijnof my first semester? No way, I learned so much from that failed experience (summary: communism is hard, especially if you are trying it with seven people who have never met each other before and most of whom are living on their own for the first time). Staying in that messy and noisy Bagijnhof house when I could have moved to a cheaper room with my own kitchen in Koestraat? No, I became good friends with housemates that I otherwise would never have gotten to know, and I treasure my memories of an apocalyptic kitchen every Wednesday morning, terribly repetitive house pranks, and the occasional flooded living room (two broken 40 liter aquariums and one kitchen tap accidently left on for several hours).
What about something completely different like not joining Fides in my first semester? Maybe, although as much as I love wearing pink, I prefer port and cheese to prosecco and frozen cucumbers. Getting tipsy right before my final history presentation? Come to think of it, that was one of the better ideas of my sixth semester. Missing my own graduation to intern in Washington DC? Well… that might have been a mistake in retrospect. I was quite emotional when I saw the pictures and I realized I should have been there. But it was a mistake I learned from, so not a regret necessarily.
Speaking of the difference between mistakes and regrets, all of my clear-cut regrets are of things I didn’t do, rather than things I did do. In a nutshell, I regret not being more adventurous: socially and academically. Whether it was not inviting that cute girl from SportsCo for a drink at De Mug, to only having audited one course, I look back at missed opportunities as my only real regrets. And there were many opportunities I left by the side of the road.
It’s a shame that I only audited one class for one hour during my entire three years, when I was very interested in courses my friends were majoring in and I could have easily walked into them any day of the week. It’s a shame that apart from a few streets I didn’t really explore Middelburg until my final months there. It’s a shame that I never went to an inter-UC sports tournament out of sheer apathy and laziness, even though I know I would have enjoyed it. It’s a shame that the Brosettes only sang once at Jump on Stage, when we kept telling each other how great it would be to perform at the Night of the Talents. It’s a shame that in my third year I opted for several easy courses rather than challenge myself more. It’s a shame that I stopped attending indoor football in my second year when less people began to show up, rather than take an active role in reviving it. It’s a shame that in Middelburg I avoided quantitative subjects like the bubonic plague, only to be bombarded by them my first few months of postgrad. Now I’ve started to enjoy them, and I envy classmates who are much better at them. I honestly regret not doing more statistics at UCR, and if I could redo my course choices, the top of the list would be reserved for Econometrics. And finally, it’s a shame that I lived under the delusion that bad habits would go away in postgrad, and I naively thought that paying ten times as much for my 9:00AM lecture would make it harder for me to press snooze. It hasn’t.
So there you have it, a few of my actual regrets. But, suppose I had to choose a single biggest regret, as the title of this article indicates. Well, there is one issue close to my heart that I’ve remained silent on. In order to placate the wrath of Tabula Rasa’s draconian American Editor in Chief, who has been incessantly hounding me for an article, I now write with the utmost of sincerity: I look back on my time at UCR with idyllic fondness, the only blemish is that I wrote too few articles for Tabula Rasa. Sorry Trevor.
Willem van den Berg, UCR alumnus, class of 2013, is currently in the M.Phil program of International Relations at the University of Oxford. He is from Makassar, Indonesia.
