After a grueling four weeks of summer school, I think the thing I wanted the most was just to relax. Spend the remainder of my unproductive summer playing Xbox and idling about like most young male adults. However, I am nearly reaching the post-grad stage and I want to do something different this summer. Something different with my life.

Maybe I’m suffering from some low-inferiority complex. I think it’s because of the fact that I’m a 22-year-old boy. I don’t have a job, no apartment, no car and that I still have my mom telling me who I can’t hang out with. It’s those little things that make me feel like a loser. But instead of whining and talking about how much I am unimpressed with my life, I can get off my butt and do something about it.

I’m in my third year of college. Well I wouldn’t call it college, It’s a Christian school that tries hard to act like it’s like a college, so it has a really different atmosphere. For everything you can think of when you think of your typical college- the parties, the drinking, co-ed dormitaries and random hook-ups, there was an appropriate substitute for those things at Liberty University. 

We had things like curfew, where on-campus students had to be in their dorms around midnight but on the weekends, they get an extra thirty minutes to hang out. Our school didn’t have a city strip near its area that was lined up with trendy bars, restaurants and diners where typical college buddies would go and come back from in a hysterical druken embrace late at night.

What most students did for fun at Liberty was go ice-skating at the Lahaye Ice Center or go to the ski-lodge that had artificial ice-slopes so students could snowboard all year round. On Wednesdays, was campus church but it was more of like a rock concert for the cool preachers’ kids to meet and hang out. Sometimes in the dorms, students played ‘water pong’ because there’s no alcohol allowed on campus.

In a normal college, when you are walking to the academic building on your way to class. By all means, you’d overhear a conversation with a lot of swearing in it like “Man, I can’t believe I got a 76 on that test! What the fuck!…”

In Liberty, most students use euphemisic alternatives for the word fuck in the above sentence like this. “Man, I can’t believe I got a 76 on that test! What the frick!…” or “What the flip man!”

Oh yeah, we also couldn’t watch R-rated movies because they would tempt us in our spiritual walk with God and stuff like that. I’m not saying that our school wasn’t normal or anything, it was just different. For the most part, I liked it. It kept me grounded.

After a grueling four weeks of summer school, I think the thing I wanted the most was just to relax. Spend the remainder of my unproductive summer playing Xbox and idling about like most young male adults. However, I am nearly reaching the post-grad stage and I want to do something different this summer. Something different with my life.

Maybe I’m suffering from some low-inferiority complex. I think it’s because of the fact that I’m a 22-year-old boy. I don’t have a job, no apartment, no car and that I still have my mom telling me who I can’t hang out with. It’s those little things that make me feel like a loser. But instead of whining and talking about how much I am unimpressed with my life, I can get off my butt and do something about it.

I’m in my third year of college. Well I wouldn’t call it college, It’s a Christian school that tries hard to act like it’s like a college, so it has a really different atmosphere. For everything you can think of when you think of your typical college- the parties, the drinking, co-ed dormitaries and random hook-ups, there was an appropriate substitute for those things at Liberty University. 

We had things like curfew, where on-campus students had to be in their dorms around midnight but on the weekends, they get an extra thirty minutes to hang out. Our school didn’t have a city strip near its area that was lined up with trendy bars, restaurants and diners where typical college buddies would go and come back from in a hysterical druken embrace late at night.

What most students did for fun at Liberty was go ice-skating at the Lahaye Ice Center or go to the ski-lodge that had artificial ice-slopes so students could snowboard all year round. On Wednesdays, was campus church but it was more of like a rock concert for the cool preachers’ kids to meet and hang out. Sometimes in the dorms, students played ‘water pong’ because there’s no alcohol allowed on campus.

In a normal college, when you are walking to the academic building on your way to class. By all means, you’d overhear a conversation with a lot of swearing in it like “Man, I can’t believe I got a 76 on that test! What the fuck!…”

In Liberty, most students use euphemisic alternatives for the word fuck in the above sentence like this. “Man, I can’t believe I got a 76 on that test! What the frick!…” or “What the flip man!”

Oh yeah, we also couldn’t watch R-rated movies because they would tempt us in our spiritual walk with God and stuff like that. I’m not saying that our school wasn’t normal or anything, it was just different. For the most part, I liked it. It kept me grounded.

There are a lot more differences and other rules that I didn’t go over regarding my school but I’ll be sure to let you know when they come to mind.

-2-

Liberty University is situated on the hills coasting along the countryside slightly isolated from the city of Lynchburg in southern Virginia. It’s rather quiet and sort of a deserted city like the one in “I am Legend”,  especially in the summer because most students are home for break. The first thing one of my friends noticed about Lynchburg was that people there actually held doors for you and the men always addressed you with either “sir” or “ma’am”. She really appreciated that because she was from New York.

I think the average age of the population is over 45 and most of its revenue comes from the student body at Liberty University. Slowly but surely, my school has been taking over Lynchburg by legally annexing estates, businesses and leased buildings. Making it one of the biggest corporations to date. This upcoming institution was headed by Dr. Jerry Falwell since 1971. I don’t know much about him but he was the first school chancellor and basically built Liberty University from the ground up. Solicited donations, mission trips and a ridiculous amount PR was what Mr. Falwell used to put Liberty on a pedestal. His sole mission was to see that his school trained its students to be Champions for Christ.

I think he did well for the school. In 2007, Dr. Falwell passed away. When that time came, it was like Liberty lost a great man and leader. The way black followers lost Dr. Martin Luther King. Then his son Jerry Falwell Jr. became successor as Chancellor and so far, He’s been doing well without his father. He ran Liberty just the way his father did. Monopolizing every inch of Lynchburg and expanding every part of Liberty from sports  to academics. Most people don’t want to admit but the Falwells run Lynchburg.

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