Traditions. Everyone has them. It seems like every family, society, and University has a long list of significant events or rituals they hold dear. At Baylor, we take traditions very seriously. I mean every Tuesday starting at 3:00 students crowd into a room in the student union building to hop in line for a Dr. Pepper float (which is for the most part just ice cream). Every home game, the freshman class sprints across the football field, as a sea of gold forms a tunnel for our football team to storm out of. Then, there's homecoming. We are proud to boast that out homecoming is the first and the larges collegiate homecoming in the nation. With that comes many events. Thursday night, the freshman class attended an event called Mass Meeting. Here, we put on our gold line jerseys and learned about the story of the Immortal Ten. These ten men lost their lives when they were so young, when they had great aspirations ahead of them. This accident in which their bus was hit by a train took place in 1927, and their stories are still being told annually. Their stories are told to inspire us to follow our dreams and live out the stories for us that were cut short for them. To conclude the ceremony, the older classes passed down the literal torch to us, metaphorically, symbolizing our role as the youngest class to embody everything that Baylor is for the years to come. We left encouraged to push forward and inspired to dream even bigger.
We left Mass Meeting to go to fountain mall, a long stretch of grass near the middle of campus. Once we arrived, bonfire building for the 2016 homecoming bonfire began. We started this task around midnight, and yes, we had classes the next day. A few people teamed up to grab a wooden pallet and together we stacked them one on top of another. The pallets grew high and around 1 AM the freshman class got in trouble for a noise violation. Maybe the music was just a little too loud.
Friday night, the festivities continued. The pep rally was loud and the bonfire was massive. The idea behind the Baylor line became real, as alumni from all of the years of Baylor's history came together on fountain mall to enjoy one another's company and all of the celebrations the weekend holds.
Traditions like these reassure us that we are apart of something much greater than ourselves. We are part of years of history, vision, and success. Students come to Baylor for various reasons: a high-quality education, the Christian atmosphere, and sometimes even to cheer on a winning sports program. Yet, greater things happen to us that mold and shape us. We grow closer to God and closer to one another. We are becoming a people equipped to lead the world with our faith as the very central focus of all we do. This shared idea draws people in and cultivates in them a love for this university. I am grateful to be apart of the family and to share in this love.
