Eric Zuniga, Campus Carrier managing editor
Nearly four years ago, when I was starting as a freshman at Berry, I wrote my first opinion piece for the Campus Carrier. It was about the importance of studying and appreciating the humanities, something I was just becoming passionate about. When I wrote that op-ed, I couldn’t truly grasp how much there still was for me to learn in college, but I knew that I had an unshakable desire to learn about the myriad ways people live and create art.
Looking back now, I think that my piece ended up rather timely. Anyone who’s kept up with current events might share my view that the past four years have been a uniquely alienating time. The US has prosecuted two incredibly deadly wars in that time, and the Trump administration has many times demonstrated absolute contempt for basic human rights. Tech companies continue to insert artificial intelligence into every aspect of our lives with little consideration for its actual usefulness or the ethics. AI slop has become depressingly common on social media. And it’s our society’s relentless obsession with efficiency and profitability that’s driving our alienation, exacerbating everything from disinvestment in higher education to the rising rates of loneliness.
At the same time I saw the world outside grow more isolating, I was lucky enough to be cocooned in the warm confines of “the Berry bubble.” Though the freshman version of me might have dismissed Berry’s promises of an idyllic academic community as marketing pablum, I ended up finding the most amazing friends and teachers I’ve ever met here. I can confidently say that going to Berry was the best decision I’ve ever made because of the people I’ve met and the lessons I’ve learned here. I’m about to graduate in a few short weeks, and I often find myself reflecting on what Berry has meant to me, and I keep coming back to one word: beauty.
My freshman self understood a little bit about beauty. It was the astonishing beauty of the prose in my favorite books that made me choose an English major. Yet I didn’t fully understand the real omnipresence and meaning of beauty until I had spent some more time in college. The very landscape of Berry itself taught me much of that: every day, I could see all the exquisite details in Berry’s magnificent buildings. Then I realized that the exertion of effort was what made something beautiful. Just as the best authors painstakingly select every single word they write, the beautiful buildings at Berry were painstakingly designed by architects and meticulously constructed by laborers and artisans. We expend the effort to make beautiful art not because we expect a return on investment or an increase in efficiency, but because we know that beauty has an intrinsic value, far beyond any measure of monetary worth.
The people I’ve met at Berry have taught me even more about the meaning of beauty. As someone who was terribly shy during most of my time in school, college was the first time I was able to meet so many like-minded friends. Getting to know so many beautifully distinctive, enthusiastic and kind people has been one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. All these friendships were the result of effort, working against the overwhelming pressure to stay isolated in today’s society. When I look back on my time at Berry, I’ll remember all the raucous late nights at the Carrier, the stupendous amount of time in the library I spent not doing any work and the little interactions I had every day far more than what I learned in my classes.
That’s the real lesson I learned at Berry. As I put my final Carrier issue to bed and prepare to leave the Gate of Opportunity for the last time as a student, I must admit that I’m a little apprehensive about what lies beyond.
Yet I still know that I’ll have all the memories I made here to ground me as I move on. Thank you to all the professors, mentors, acquaintances and friends who helped me see all the beauty in this world. I will never forget it.