The pace is different here.

That’s the first thing I noticed when I moved to RIT. While I would have felt totally fine moseying on by, folks here would sprint from sunrise to sunset. Cultural differences, when combined with the vibrant energy of a college campus, collectively harbored this infectious sense of urgency.

I had never really spent a significant enough period of time on the East coast prior to attending RIT. Growing up in Los Angeles, this whole side of the country just seemed to me to be an amalgamation of state borders stitched together into one big historically charged quilt. The mellow, West-coast culture I considered home was vastly different than that embroidered onto this campus by my new peers and class colleagues coming from skyline scraping homes in New York City and lobster dinner tables in Maine.

Yet, as different as we are, somehow together we all fall into a rhythm. These patterns in our past have taught us our daily choreography. Every morning, we pick up one foot, place it in front of the other and march on in symphony. Pitter patter, we go from here to there in perfect harmony with every other somebody, taking up space and adding to the noise of a given day.

Though the beat we step to may change depending on where we are or who we are around, we have learned to speed up or slow down to the sound of the group. Playing to our unique perspectives, we’ll even know the right time to step up for a solo.

The culture at RIT is fast-paced. The offerings are vast, the programs exciting. This campus is riddled with a curious eagerness and the wealth of opportunity to mesh these diverse perspectives. We toss ourselves into tall ambitions, know when to take it easy and recognize that success tastes as rich as that lobster dinner. Students come here to pick up momentum.

And so, our mannerisms are molded. Our lives are so different, our being even more so.