It was an unremarkable Friday afternoon in September of my first year here and I stood in the parking lot of Price Chopper with a few of my friends. We were talking about our new lives, telling each other the ways in which Hamilton differed from our own hometowns. One of my friends remarked, “There’s just nothing to do here.”
It was something I’d heard many times before, and within the past week, I started to accept it as the truth. We all laughed in agreement, and when our last friend came out of the store, we laughed even harder as we tried to pack the car with five people and all of our groceries for the week. When we got back up the hill, we spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out how to transport everything, and we ended up putting it inside suitcases and IKEA bags, making it at least a three-person effort to get everything upstairs.
Over the course of the year, I, along with countless other students, agonized over the notion that there was “nothing to do” at Colgate University. I found myself thinking about it on Thursday afternoons when I got my commons newsletter via email and scrolled through it, immediately texting my best friend when there were going to be cookies or hot chocolate in the lobbies of our buildings. We went to so many of these events that when our commons won the cup at the end of the year, we both received personalized emails to pick up prizes for our avid participation.
Over the winter, when the roads were bad and it felt like there was really “nothing to do,” I remember going to events for The Women’s Network, a club that offered so many great ways to cut through the boredom. At one event, we gathered in the Coop Media Room on a Thursday night, eating freshly catered Oliveri’s pasta. After the movie ended, another club immediately started an event — a painting and popcorn social — and my friends and I stayed for this, too. We painted a funny picture to give to our friend as a birthday present, something he still has on his desk a year later. I also attended two alumni-run workout classes, which reminded me a lot of the regularly scheduled ’Gate Fitness classes my friend and I had been attending.
I also attended a few Pilates classes at The Zen Den in town, just a quick shuttle ride from right outside my door. The intensity of the workouts made me laugh, because I knew I was way out of my comfort zone, but no one in the class seemed to notice or mind. After these classes, I’d go with my friends to get food at one of the many restaurants in town. We had made it a goal to try every single one by the end of the year, and we were successful, ending the spring with a list of new favorite spots. We even had a couple of dinners at the Colgate Inn, where we were lucky enough to use our bonus dollars on high-quality steaks that, after weeks of nothing but dining hall food, seemed too good to be true.
Evidently, to say that there is “nothing to do” in Hamilton would be a lie. We never struggled to find something, whether it was admiring the farmer’s market on weekend mornings while we walked to Flour & Salt or coming back on a slow weeknight to attend special movie events at the Hamilton Movie Theater. At Christmas time, we attended Hamilton’s tree lighting ceremony, listening in awe to Colgate’s a cappella groups, who sang beautifully even in the negative-degree weather.
Of course, I can’t give Hamilton all the credit. The surrounding towns, too, offer plenty of “nothing to do.” The night my friends and I drove back to campus after winter break, when our typical three-and-a-half-hour drive from the New York Palisades took almost six hours, we decided to go to Ray Brothers BBQ, where we shared amazing food and told stories about our vacations. Most of us quickly realized that it was possible we over-ordered, so we brought leftovers back to one of our rooms and played our own version of Tetris: we shoved everyone’s food into one fridge so that we didn’t have to go home and end the night so early.
Like many other Colgate students, my friends and I also frequented New Hartford, a thirty-minute drive from campus. This is no further than many of the places I used to go at home, where I’d never claim there was “nothing to do.” We spent many birthdays (including fake ones that we created in an attempt to get free desserts) at Red Samurai and Texas Roadhouse. We shopped together at Sangertown Square, driving past the Get Air Trampoline Park each time along the way, which we plan to visit for our next outing.
I’m sure people will continue to say there’s “nothing to do” at Colgate, but every student here has a thousand shopping trips to make, new foods to try, workouts to do, walks to go on, events to check out and memories to make. In my experience, these “nothing” activities have been everything.
