When I was probably 15 years old, a nerdy homeschooled kid living in Texas, I was one day browsing a clothing rack at some cheap retailer - probably K-Mart or whatever the 1990’s equivalent of TJMaxx is today - and finding a royal blue t-shirt with the Yale Bulldogs logo on it. I knew Yale was a prestigious school but not much more than that. My nerdy self sort of liked the shirt, so I bought it and wore it regularly. Occasionally I would get questions on it. “Are you going to Yale?” No, I would reply, I just liked the shirt. In these pre-Internet (at least for us!) days, what I knew about Yale was basically what my folks had said: super-expensive, super-liberal. We were super-conservative and super-poor, so that was basically that. (I eventually attended a less-expensive, but still private, Christian university that was a lot closer to home.)

It was only much later in my life that I realized that the catalog price published for university tuition is like the “room rate” you see posted on the inside of hotel room doors - a huge number that frequently doesn’t reflect the reality of what you’ll have to put out of pocket. In retrospect, my story had all the hallmarks of a good case for a big Ivy League scholarship. A unique educational background. Fantastic test scores and grades. Superb writing skills. Reasonable extracurriculars. In reality’s timeline, I took the highest scholarship that LeTourneau gave for academics (only 20% of my yearly cost!), coupled it with a bunch of grants, and still paid off college loans for a decade afterward. I got a reasonably good education at LeTourneau, met my wife there, got a job, moved to Iowa, hadn’t thought about Yale in a long time.

Earlier this year my work team won a big corporate award, and earlier this week we got to travel to one of our big corporate headquarters sites in Connecticut to be honored at an awards banquet. We all got to bring a +1, so we had several spouses in attendance too. Becky came along and we lightly stretched the travel to make a mini-vacation of it. (As much as a 3-day, 2-night trip can be a vacation, I guess.)

One of those days while we were out sightseeing we drove out to New Haven and spent a couple hours walking around the Yale campus, visiting its museums, sticking our heads into the old buildings, and generally taking in the scene. We’ve walked around a few college campuses the past few years with the kids doing college tours themselves. Campuses have a unique energy, and at an elite school this is amplified. On one hand, I observed, it’s Yale - everybody there is special. That’s sort of table stakes for admission. On the other hand, it’s clear that all these “special” students are still really just 18-to-20-something college kids.

I wondered, as we walked down the shady streets and past the old stone buildings, how would 18-year-old Chris have handled Yale? It would’ve been a move halfway across the country, a country boy plopped down in an East coast city, a sheltered conservative religious kid at a secular institution. Would I have been the stubborn fundamentalist arguing with all my professors? The church kid who went to college and gave up his faith? Or could the sudden emergence from my evangelical bubble have accelerated my movement toward the more tolerant, liberal faith that I have finally come to in my 40s?

What-if’s like this are to a great extent pointless. There are no do-overs. I’m happy and content with where my path has taken me. I was probably better suited for engineering than humanities or law, anyway. But for one fall afternoon, it was fun to walk down the streets of New Haven and idly imagine other pasts.