Maeve Collins isn't the first. Every time she takes a step on campus, she knows her parents, cousins and uncles have taken the exact same walk as her.
Every building she walks into, every club she joins and every class she attends, she isn't the first out of her family to do so.
She feels the pressure to become a merger like her parents, to attend a top-level graduate school like her mother, to have as much fun as her uncle did on campus.
Does she want to rush a sorority like her cousin? Does she want to be here for five years like her father? She doesn't know.
Maeve has always considered herself different than her parents. She has different ideals than them, a different personality and interests.
Her parents have been telling her the story of how they met at freshman orientation for as long as she could remember, and she got sick of the story fast. While the love story was cute, she never saw her future at Miami. She wanted to live a different life than all her relatives did.
So, when it was finally time for her to chose her own path, she applied to six schools scattered all over the country.
New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Dallas, Boulder, Memphis. She never thought she would end up in Oxford.
Yet, here she is. Life is funny like that sometimes.
She doesn't complain anymore when she hears her parents merger story. She likes visiting her cousin and her two kids -- a little Miami family.
Most of all, she likes knowing that even though she'll never be the first to walk these halls, she will never be alone at this school as long as her family's memories are still here.
beckerzf@miamioh.edu