I pack my dorm room in much the same way that I pack my suitcase: I wait until the last minute, and then I throw everything together quickly. It’s easy enough, really, and it doesn’t matter that I won’t be coming back to this room, because I’ve never come back to any of my dorm rooms, and I wouldn’t want to. But as it turns out, rooms and suitcases aren’t the only thing that need packing; As the Office of Information Technology (OIT) was kind enough to inform seniors, e-mail and H: drives need to be packed up as well.
Actually, I already knew about e-mail. When I graduated from high school, I learned what happens to school e-mail accounts post-commencement, and I learned it the hard way. This time around, I was prepared to safeguard my scholastic correspondence, and a few weeks ago I took the precaution of backing up my princeton.edu inbox in a new Gmail account. It took Gmail about two days to upload all 4,000-plus backlogged messages in my inbox.
Watching my Gmail inbox grow backwards, uploading my newest messages first, was an interesting exercise that put my Princeton career in perspective (maybe). Five-hundred e-mails ago, I was handing in my thesis, which means that a little bit less than an eighth of the e-mail communications I’ve bothered to keep happened over the course of the last month. That my inbox is so top-heavy illustrates just how much things have changed. When I first came to Princeton, our inboxes were tiny, and I was often forced to delete unimportant messages to make way for new ones.
But really, the Princeton experience is rather top-heavy, with notably increased workloads later on. It’s not just about schoolwork, however; during junior and senior year, life at Princeton becomes markedly more remarkable. Senior and junior years live most vividly in my imagination, not because they are the most recent periods of my life but because they were the most vivid time I’ve had at Princeton. Before that, freshman fall shines brightest in my memory.
As I checked to make sure Gmail had uploaded all of my messages, I went back and reread the earliest e-mails I kept from my first weeks here: messages from new friends and new professors who are now dear friends and respected professors. There were also e-mails from old teachers and old friends from before Princeton, appearing much more prominently in the first 100 messages than in the last 500. If I wanted to be morbid, I could compare the experience to watching my life, or at least my Princeton life, flash before my eyes. Whatever it was, it was fun, and nothing like packing.
For a while, I got all my e-mails in duplicate: They would appear in my old webmail inbox and in the Gmail one, and then OIT came in, like my mom, and told me it was time to pack — they even offered to do it for me. Once again, I backed up my Princeton e-mail. It went much more quickly with OIT than it did with Gmail, just a matter of hours rather than a matter of days. I didn’t think anything of it at first. The “Suitcase” application that “packs up” your e-mail just creates a .zip file to download, so there’s no opportunity to live through your e-mail life like Benjamin Button. It’s the sort of packing up that involves no packing, so in theory, it’s a dream come true. Except of course, that it’s not, because now that OIT has packed up my e-mail, all my incoming messages skip the inbox.
Unlike my room, my Princeton webmail is empty and unlived-in, and its saddening in a way that bare walls aren’t, because while I’ve packed my room up many times before, I’ve never done it with e-mail, and in some ways, my e-mail account captures my life more than my room does. My now-barren inbox has made real to me the fact that it’s time to leave in ways that handing in the thesis, or even my comprehensive exams, has not. The emptiness is more than a little distressing. Nonetheless, it isn’t a tragedy: I’ve learned something. The only thing worse than packing up your life is having someone else pack it up for you, because it robs you of the opportunity to take inventory of your experience.
So this year, as I pack up my dorm room for the last time, I think I’ll take more care as I round up the things I’ve collected over the years and say goodbye to the drawers that have stored them. And who knows? I might even start packing ahead of schedule!
Martha Vega-Gonzalez is a history major from New York. She can be reached at mvega@princeton.edu.
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