This past weekend thousands of 18- year-olds crammed their families and most of their possessions into vehicles and prepared to start a new chapter in their lives. The joy on their faces was evident as they looked around the sprawling campus and breathed in the fresh aroma of freedom that was filling the air. Seeing the smiling happy faces made me reflect on my freshman year, On move-in day the only thing on my mind was finding an Owen’s mover to help make my move a little easier and sending my family on their merry way so I could finally do what I wanted to without having to answer to anybody. Call it mean if you want to, but if you were raised by a Jamaican man and were the oldest girl out of four siblings, you’d feel the same way. For some reason, move-in felt different for me. It wasn’t the fact that I wasn’t moving, I’ve been living on campus since the fall of 2001, and it wasn’t the fact that I now live in West Village. No,that wasn’t it. Oh, I know what it was, it was the fact that the freshman were welcomed as if they were Jesus Christ himself arisen from the tomb. Okay, this may be a bit of exaggeration on my part, but I do not remember a deejay being present when I moved in that memorable day on September 16, 2000. Nor do I remember the red balloons strewn about campus. No, if my memory serves me correctly the only thing I remember is rickety cardboard signs that were placed throughout campus to help my family and I navigate through campus. I suppose when your school becomes the number one co-op school in U.S. News and World Report things start to change. I guess that honor must serve more of a purpose than an annoying little pop-up add on NU’s Web site. All joking aside, the freshman, and those who took a hiatus from NU and returned, received an extravagant homecoming. I suppose it was well deserved, especially for those parents that pushed carts and carried their children’s belongings miles across a concrete maze in the sweltering heat. Perhaps they served food and drink at various stops in an effort to keep down the volume of parents and kids falling faint throughout campus from dehydration and malnutrition. Well we all know what move-in marks, it marks the end of the summer, the beginning of fall and the start of new memories.