My freshman year at Iowa State, an esteemed senior Daily columnist, Greg, imparted what seemed to be sound advice at the time.

“Omar,” he advised, “when you’re a columnist, don’t ever think about writing one of those [insert expletive] sappy goodbye columns.”

Sorry Greg, I’ve got to do it.

This journey called college was forged of the experience of the Cross-Cultural Learning Community in Linden Hall.

There were about 10 international students and 10 American students.

There was Doowan, a Korean from Jamaica; Mahesh, an Indian from Zimbabwe; people from Bangladesh, Japan, Norway, Ghana, Korea and several U.S. states rounded out the group.

Polk City native Luke was our inspiration for things as far and wide as soccer and joke telling. Our intrepid Indian peer leader, Ashish, furnished the example for the campus superheroes we all aspired to be.

Coming from a town neighboring Ames and already being familiar with the campus, I hoped that the learning community would mix things up a bit. It worked.

We had dinners and took a class together, but it was the late-night discussions about our respective backgrounds that provided the framework for the friendship that has lasted.

We regularly stayed up many nights adrift in vast discussions about everything from God to computers to the monsoon season in Bangladesh.

It was the expectation that one of us would say something shocking that would spark a few hours of conversation.

The full spectrum of colors showed when Devitt House hit the soccer field. Intramural soccer was a tradition that continued for both indoor and outdoor seasons for four years. We weren’t very good that first year. But by the second year, we had the addition of several new players.

Fares, our daring Jordanian goalkeeper extraordinaire, brought with him his skills and his eternal fire of love for the English soccer club Arsenal. It was in the second and third years that things began to look up for the Devitt House squads.

The addition of two former Ames High all-stars in the second and third year, brothers Basil and Tamim and my own brother Ramsey, added to the team people who actually played well.

Perhaps the only hindrance to our success was Basil’s rather eerie fascination with a certain has-been, rat-tailed Italian star of the 1994 World Cup.

Despite our downfalls, these new players breathed life into our

team and we were surprisingly successful, winning the co-recreational intramural championships in 2002 and 2003 and were runners up in men’s in 2002 and 2003.

Perhaps the culmination came with a literally last-second goal to win the championship last fall by Elizabeth in the only goal of her recent career. It was the storybook ending to the too-brief journey called college.

It was in August of 2000 we came from all over the world to this place, amid the corn and soybean fields of central Iowa.

After this week we will again find ourselves in various corners of the planet.

What a ride it’s been.

Thanks for the memories, everyone.

Omar Tesdell is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Slater.