After I’d been accepted to Colgate and was trying to decide if I wanted to come here, I remember feeling bombarded by the sheer number of opportunities this campus had to offer. One opportunity that was shared with me was to be invited to your professor’s house for dinner. Whether the person I was speaking to intended it in this way or not, I was basically under the impression that at some point over the course of my Colgate career, I was guaranteed to be invited to one of my professor’s houses.

You can imagine my disappointment as I made it almost all the way to the end of the first semester of my sophomore year and had not yet been invited to such an occasion. However, my History Workshop professor came in clutch and invited my class over for dinner at his house just this past Thursday. I was absolutely elated, and now that I’ve had the opportunity, I find myself reflecting back on why I was so excited vs why I ultimately had such a great time.

From when I first heard that professors invited their students over for dinner, I thought this was a wonderful thing for two reasons.

First of all, it’s something that makes small schools unique, since a professor cannot very well invite a class of 200 students over to his or her house. Having made the decision to attend a small school, as any psychologist would likely explain using cognitive dissonance, I find myself increasingly enamored by small-school specific activities.

Second, I always wanted to go to a professor’s house for dinner because I think professors are inherently cool. These are people who have dedicated their lives to learning, and it certainly takes a special kind of people. A brilliant kind of people. The kind of people we could all probably benefit from taking a page out of their books -- or just reading their books (especially during finals season am I right?).

Eating dinner with a professor at his or her house is undeniably more intimate than being in a classroom, so such a dinner provides ample opportunity to get to know your professor better. While we no longer hold the stereotypical childhood belief that our teachers live at school, I think a nagging question about professors is how they act when they’re outside of the classroom. You might have thought I was going to answer that question, but, I can’t because I only have one data point. That being said, our schools urge us to reside in a living-learning community, and a professor’s house seems to be a great example of that.

Now that I have eaten dinner at a professor's house, I can say that it reaffirmed my decision to go to a small school and gave me a better perspective on the life of a professor, as I’d hoped, but what ultimately made the experience the most rewarding was that eating dinner at a professor’s house was refreshing since I spend so much of the year away from my family home and am entrenched in a wholly different environment.

I found myself satisfied by the smallest things like eating home-cooked food, in my case lasagna, and eating family style around a real dinner table. It was also nice to eat dinner and make conversation with people I don’t usually do so with. While dinner becomes incredibly social in college, we often eat dinner with the very same people with whom we spent the rest of the day, and conversation is qualitatively different.

Most importantly, some professors have pets, and I don’t have to tell you dog-owners out there that getting to pet a dog is the next best thing to getting to pet your own dog, and there are far too few dogs on college campuses.

I truly hope that everyone has the opportunity to fall in love all over again with their school, get to know their professors better, feel at home when they’re away from home, and pet a dog. At Colgate, a great way to do that is to go to dinner at your professor’s house.