“How’s school going?”

I get the question at least once a week from parents, friends, friends of parents, parents of friends, and people whose relationship to me I’m not certain of. The typical answer comes from a bag of 1-5 word responses, including “good,” “great,” “it’s getting tougher,” and “it’s definitely keeping me busy.” It’s a deceptively hard question to answer because you have to interpret how much the asker really wants to know. In one scenario, you are asked as a formality after you tell someone you’re a sophomore at Rice, but they don’t really care, so you tailor the answer accordingly or in a way that keeps the conversation going. In the other scenario, the inquisitor really does care, and then you have to determine whether they want the academic, social, or emotional answer. Regardless of which scenario or middleground the question lies in, my response will only graze the surface of my true answer.

Determining how to answer the question is a combination of assessing the setting, my relationship to the asker, the asker’s body language and tone of voice, and more subconscious analyses that I don’t know how to describe. To fully answer the question to the best of my ability, without evaluating the inquirer’s intentions, would require a monologue longer than even my parents or closest friends would be willing to listen to. For practicality’s sake, I would have to divide the answer into different sections and answer each in a different sitting.

I tend to perceive the question in an academic sense, as I believe that is the most literal meaning of the question. School, by definition, is a place where you go and learn things. “How is school going?” is often perceived as a reflection of how well you learned the things you were taught, or more literally, what grades you got. In this regard, school has been going very well. But in the present moment, as a sophomore one and a half months into the fall semester, there are no substantial grades yet to truly reflect how school will end up by the semester’s end. In the past few weeks, school has been getting more challenging. The fall semesters will always be more difficult because of the demands of Division 1 football, which I estimate to be around 60 hours a week, including weekends and travel. As I dive deeper into the business major requirement classes, the rigor increases, and I end up having to use more time outside of class to adequately understand the content and complete the assignments. I recognize that this semester will require significantly more effort to achieve my desired outcome. That being said, I’m excited for the challenge.

Socially, school is still an underexplored environment. When asked about the social component of school, I answer with vague affirmations and stories of guys on the football team that people find entertaining. I can go on and on talking about practices, meetings, lifts, meals, and other parts of my day-to-day interactions with my teammates, but that’s about it. I would say there are fewer than fifty non-athletes at Rice that I know by name because I’ve yet to venture off to foreign parts of the campus where athletes seldom go. I sit by athletes in classes, I practically work a full-time job with the football players, and my roommates all play football. Don’t get me wrong, my social experience has been great in school, but I acknowledge its lack of variety. Out of all the different areas of school and how it’s going, the social component is the one that I can improve on the most.

Emotionally, school has been going peacefully. Many people struggle with the emotional aspect of school because they are far from home, pressured by family, or still trying to figure out if the school is the right fit for them. I am fortunate to have avoided many of these emotionally draining circumstances. I was born and raised in Houston, the school I went to for most of my life is four miles away, and my family is about eight miles away. My dad graduated from Rice in ‘99, so the Rice experience is far from foreign to me. The football team that I am a part of acts as a 105-person supportive family. I am thoroughly enjoying my time at Rice and the people that I spend it with.

The further one picks apart the original question of “how’s school going,” the nuances that make the question so complicated become clearer. There is, therefore, no simple answer. While my family likely wants to know how school will be going by the time finals roll around, most acquaintances might instead be asking how school has gone. My response is never a lie, but the aspects of school that I focus on change depending on who has asked. There is consistency to my answer, though, because no matter what aspect of school I focus on or what time period I am referring to, it will be positive. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in college so far, and have managed to achieve each of my personal goals. Therefore, no matter how I respond, my answer will always begin or end with “great.”