Edit desk: Another kind of legacy

“’I go to seek a “Great Perhaps.”‘”

Like a lot of high school seniors I knew, my college essay began with a quote. It was from my favorite book and — like the Common Application told me to — I used it to explain my fervor for life and learning, and how I’d bring that gusto to Lehigh to be the best version of myself. Maybe change the world in the process.

You know, the usual.

So now, with a couple of weeks until I shake a few important people’s hands, move that tassel over and miraculously transform from undergraduate to alumna, I’ve been thinking about what I wrote.

Finding one’s “Great Perhaps” is the ultimate existential mission. It’s the search for your purpose in the world — that which you can spend your whole life doing, and doing in a way that matters.

I admit it’s a largely romanticized thought. But for me, that “Great Perhaps” was about finding something I felt good about pursuing. Like many others, I was undecided and indecisive, and the thought of knowing my place and having a purpose seemed like the answer to life’s biggest question.

Hopefully — eventually — we all find that thing. Personally, I realized I wanted to spend my life doing journalism and telling the most important stories. But I have since learned what you do with your “Great Perhaps” is just as important as finding it in the first place. So, lately, I’ve been preoccupied with the notion of my legacy.

At some point, you ask yourself, years from now: Will it have mattered I was at Lehigh?

The question can be haunting, but of course we’d all like to think so. We hope we’ve been faithful friends, effective leaders and the kind of students our professors want to teach. Even more than that, some of us have had impact in the research we’ve implemented, the companies we’ve started and the communities we’ve served. Maybe even the newspaper we’ve run, too.

There’s a tangible legacy we leave behind. Awards will be presented and records will be set as evidence of that. But entertain the idea that there’s an aspect of legacy that cannot be measured as easily.

I love to tell people — pretty incessantly, many can attest — that we’re all products of the people and things around us. We’re our own people, but that’s because we’re made up of some unique combination of things we’ve gleaned from others.

We learn about passion from our favorite professor, loyalty from our best friends and commitment from the people we work — and spend hours in a newsroom — with. From a semi-weekly newspaper, you can learn how to listen to people, to never be apathetic and to stop underestimating yourself. In return, you give those people whatever you have to offer. Maybe it’s courage or the importance of being a little bit silly.

And so I’d like to think my legacy continues, even if my time on South Mountain doesn’t. There’s no need to panic over what has defined your time here, because real impact is something that cannot be confined to a set amount of time — especially four years worth of it.

A real legacy isn’t left behind, but rather, something that’s taken with you. Wherever you go, you impart yourself onto others. Your legacy is how you touch people — how you make them different and better after knowing you.

At least, that’s the kind of legacy I hope to have. It’s the kind of legacy that high school, college-essay writing me would be proud of.

By that reasoning, maybe graduation isn’t the end. It just marks the beginning of the next search for that “Great Perhaps” — the next places and people our legacies will impact.

And so I don’t have any more words left to share except these, partially stolen from the aforementioned college essay. They’re the very same ones that got me to Lehigh, and the ones that, quite fittingly, will see me out:

“I go to seek my ‘Great Perhaps,’ and I think I know where to start.”

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Jacqueline Tenreiro, ’16, is the editor in chief of The Brown and White. She can be reached at [email protected].