The OU Clocktower has had some special significance to me since a certain Saturday a week after finals week Freshman year. That day I walked around campus, taking pictures of different spots, buildings, and statues. It was a nice day and our campus was beautiful as ever so as I walked around reflecting on the end of my first year of college I decided to take some pictures.
One of the places I came to was the clocktower. I knew the legends about it: how walking under it means you graduate late (which apparently was never a risk since I’m graduating late anyways!), and how walking under it and looking up means you never graduate (still definitely avoiding that one!). So maybe that gave it some significance when thinking about the years passing in college. Maybe it was also simply that it was a nice structure, and a convenient one. Whatever the factors were, somehow as I took pictures there an idea came to me.
I don’t know if I had already decided I ought to come back and take pictures at the end of every year, but if I hadn’t yet, I decided to that day. And when I came for a walk on campus I would take a picture with the clocktower. In fact, I would take pictures from a number of different sides, depending on how far I was into college. Taking these pictures would be a way of looking back at college, seeing myself at different times, with the clocktower as a sort of landmark which might not change much, but would reflect the years of my time in college and signify those walks on campus at the end of every year.
I wasn’t as used to taking or posing for pictures freshman year, but I was already getting better. The one that year was taken from the south side of the tower.
In subsequent years I was not so good at going for that walk soon after finals week. It often got pushed back into the summer. My sophomore year I took a summer class during the June session and on July 5th, during my last weekend in Norman that summer, I went for my second end-of-year walk. That year I took pictures from the south and west sides of the tower.
In junior year I did a little better, taking the walk and pictures on May 23, 2019. That year, instead of wearing my normal dark blue/gray t-shirts, I was wearing a special shirt I’d just gotten that semester. In the spring semester I had been in the Auden course, an intense but incredibly rewarding (intellectually, not on paper) Letters course taught by the professors from History, Classics, and English. I was joining a good friend for this second part of the course, and she was a student in Creative Media Production. She created a class t-shirt that was adopted and given to each student (the majority of the design is on the back).
When classes went online in the spring of 2020 and I began to work from my apartment in Norman, the spring and summer began to blend together. There wasn’t quite a clear dividing point as there had been in previous years. Nonetheless, on the Sunday before the last week of the June block of summer classes, I went on an end of year walk on campus for the fourth time. Again, I came to the clocktower and took pictures. This time I took one from the east and had a picture from all four sides.
The clocktower at OU signifies time, progress, and the graduation goal of college for many students. This sequence of pictures carried some of that significance for me, but also signifies the ends of my academic years across college.. It has also been a landmark of my life every week passing between the library, physics classes, math classes, and other parts of the academic life that I have loved at this university.
I’m not sure yet what I’ll do when I walk around after I graduate, but I’m sure it will include some sort of exciting fifth shot of the clocktower: perhaps from underneath looking up!
