Salutations, fellow Anselmians, and welcome back to the Hilltop! For those of you who are students for the first time on our little corner of the world, I bid thee welcome.

A few do’s/don’ts for the freshmen; do be a social butterfly and try to get to know the people around you.

Don’t be afraid to check out an interesting club on campus, even if you don’t know a single person in it (although dragging a new friend along for the ride might make things easier). After all, your time here flies by much quicker than you think.

Greetings and pep talks aside, for most upperclassmen like myself, our summers were full of workdays, internships, and once in a lifetime experiences.

All three of those things collided in my case as, I was able to spend a full six weeks of the summer abroad, digging up a wide variety of artifacts and getting a first-hand glimpse into the very bizarre world of archaeological excavations.

Through this incredible experience, I was able to “dig up” some tidbits of information that might help inform us all as we, seniors and freshmen alike, prepare to take our first real steps into a brave new world.

Before I get into talking about such information, I am mandated by my being a Mainer to talk about the state of Maine (see what I did there, “state” of Maine as in what state of affairs, but it’s also a state…I’ll stop with the bad puns for now).

Despite it being about a year since Dakota the Husky went on his homicidal rampage (well, homicidal against other dogs), no one has figured out yet whether or not the governor’s pardoning of the dog was legally valid or not.

Other “bad dogs” like the boxer who bit a toddler’s face in Wiscasset have been treated normally by the legal system (that is, they are quarantined and “destroyed”-whatever that means) and so it appears that we won’t have to revisit this legal issue for some time.

Other important news includes job growth in the state of Maine expecting to practically stagnate by 2026, as the population ages and the young people leave the state in search of better jobs elsewhere, and my father was featured in a prominent local magazine. He’s a first-rate taxidermist specializing in wild game, so it’s a pretty big boost for his business.

Aside from spending the remaining half of my summer singing along to country music while chopping up meats (Boy, I really butchered the lyrics with that one) at the Hannaford butcher shop, I was able to partake in an exciting archaeological excavation in the heart of romanticized Italy.

Through this experience I participated in very average archaeologist activities like bailing buckets of water, folding/refolding gigantic tarps, running away from venomous centipedes, and weed whacking with a rusty reaper like a desperate Russian peasant.

In short, I did a lot of very average archaeologist activities in very hot temperatures, and aside from learning that being an archaeologist is nothing like being Indiana Jones (in fact, in many ways, Jones is quite a poor archaeologist) I also learned a few things that just might prove relevant for the rest of us as we approach the beginning of the end of our college careers.

If you have a dream of doing something rather unique/fun (like, say, participating in an archaeological dig), just because you didn’t major in it or go down the “proper” career path for it doesn’t mean you’ll never do it. One of our trench (or area of a site we worked in) supervisors was a soil scientist who had always wanted to help conduct a dig but never got the opportunity when she was younger; another was an English major in college who lucked out at a startup biotechnology company, and now gets to spend most of his days digging up the past all over the Mediterranean.

It just goes to show that dreams are in fact achievable, even after the opportunity-laden days of college are long over, albeit in asymmetric ways.

As Jeff Goldblum says in Jurassic Park, “Life, uh, finds a way”-as do the deep desires of individuals. Although they might not arrive in the manner or format originally anticipated, they will likely arrive just the same.

So just try to dig into the (non-alcoholic until 21, right kids?) aspects of the college experience as much as possible without worrying so much as to whether a major or initial career choice will lock away certain dreams forever.

After all, college is a time to challenge yourself and experience new things when there isn’t yet so much at steak.