John Sexton

College brought two experiences that stay with me to this day: 1. I began teaching in my Sophomore year in 1961 and have never stopped. 2. I first visited the Grand Canyon in 1963, to which I return (now, always with my family) regularly to spend eight days on the river.

Stephen Holmes

I attended Denison University, a small liberal arts college in central Ohio, and I will never forget the first day of the fall semester of my sophomore year when I began auditing a class on Chaucer given by the star of the English literature faculty, Professor Merle Brown. I think I spent the entire hour levitated from my chair, riveted by the dazzling brilliance of the lecture. By the end of class, I knew that I was going to become a professor. It was the moment when the rest of my life was set on track.

Scott Fitzgerald

My undergrad education was clearly marked by sleepovers on the couch of the campus radio station, receiving my first email address, realizing how much I could get away with in off-campus housing with a half-dozen friends, and understanding how much trouble we could get into when we weren’t careful.

Philip Kennedy (1995)

At Oxford you have these big exams at the end of your degree; they're stressful and I remember the relief of being done with them. Aside from that, I remember going out on Monday nights‎ to dance at the "era club” and hours spent smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and chatting. Just moments spent in a cloud of cigarette smoke between lectures. The most torrid experience I had as an undergrad was refereeing a soccer game between my Oxford college and the students from the Ruskin training to head up the workers' unions. Each side just seemed to want to cripple the other, for no reason I've ever figured out, and there was little respect for the "ref" caught in the middle!

Peter Dicce (1985)

Although I have many warm memories from my time at college, the fondest [ones] revolve around meeting my beautiful wife, the vivid colors of autumn leaves and the collective experiences I shared with my teammates. When I find myself back in the United States in October or November, I enjoy closing my eyes, inhaling the crisp fall air and traveling back in time.

Alexis Gambis

In my junior year of college, I went for winter break to a small town in the north part of Thailand near Chiang Rai where we taught English to kids and helped build a school. This photo was taken right after an intense game of marbles and the winner, Sam-Choi, is the boy between me and my college friend Corey. Some 10+ years later, Corey and I are coincidentally members of the NYUAD community.

Andrew Starner

I don't know if college students as a whole were less politically aware in my generation, but when I started at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1998, campus activism was the least of my concerns. I was in school to learn, not critique. Things started to change when I settled on a major—American Studies—that challenged me to reconsider many of my attachments and beliefs. By the time I got my diploma, I had a new appreciation for what my country had achieved and, more importantly, what its people might be capable of in the future. A moment in this journey that was certainly one of the more memorable ones came in the spring semester of 2001, shortly after a man who did not win a majority of the votes in the presidential election was inaugurated. I was taking a class on 20th-century U.S. American literature that required, among other things, completing a group project. Somehow, I convinced a handful of my classmates that we could actually get course credit for staging a protest. No, we weren't belatedly protesting Bush v. Gore; instead, we would recreate a watershed moment in the movement against the Vietnam War when 70,000 protesters converged on the Pentagon. You may be familiar with this 1967 event from iconic photographs of peace activists who, when confronted by armed policemen, stuffed their rifle barrels with flowers. Happily, we weren't met with anything like that kind of response when we showed up at the undergraduate business school in tie-dyed shirts with tambourines and plans to levitate it; mostly, we confused and annoyed our fellow students. We'd chosen this building as our target because we were convinced that the classes held inside were teaching the antithesis of what students ought to learn in school... And because it was centrally located. Looking back on the events of that day, I can't say for sure how serious we were. The protest was a mixture of expedience (it was more fun that writing a paper), performance (let's pretend it's the ‘60s all over again!), and real sentiment (society must be changed for the better). Then I realize that to a great extent, these three factors continue to sustain my life and thought to this day: "Rise! Rise!" indeed.

Goffredo & Francesca Puccetti, 1989

So here’s one photo I have found: yours truly and Francesca. [In the] summer of 1989, I was a freshman, Fra a sophomore. My favorite memories of college ... I really don't know. It is the kind of question that calls for way too many possible answers! [The] nice memories are those related to the train trips we took every day from our neighborhoods to the campus and back. It took more than one hour. We took the same train but at different stations. It was pretty straightforward to meet in the morning, but then Fra and I had different schedules and studied in separate buildings. There were no mobile phones, no Messenger back then, so one delayed class was enough to disrupt all our plans to do the commute back together! So when we took the train we changed cars at every station, checking for each other. Quite often when we checked the whole train, we waited for the next one and repeated the search, just in case.

Bryan Waterman, 1991

Here I am with the staff of Student Review, an independent student magazine I worked on and for which I later became co-editor-in-chief and then co-publisher. (My co-editor and co-publisher, who also grew up to become a literature professor, is buried in there somewhere, as are a few other people who are still among my best friends.) This photo was taken, I think, on a night when we tried to camp out in a crawl space beneath the black box theater in our arts center. After we were thrown out by security, one of these friends (now a psychiatrist in Manhattan) pulled his car onto a supposedly non-accessible campus sidewalk to pick us up, accidentally ran into a campus cop on a bike, and later had to make a court appearance related to the incident. We sponsored a fundraiser to cover his fine. At least that's how I remember it. I don't think I lived in the house featured in this photo yet but I moved into it a few months later. The picture from The Shining was still in the fireplace.