One year, a couple of weeks into the fall quarter, a student waited until everyone else had left the Voorhies classroom, then approached me and said tentatively, “I have a question.” I thought it would be about the day’s lesson or the syllabus or a grade. She pulled a small blue rectangle from her backpack. “How do you write a check?” she asked. A new student with her first bank account, she wasn’t sure how it worked. I sometimes suspect the information I gave her then was more useful than anything else I said the entire term.

For most of us, our education at Davis encompasses much more than the courses listed on our transcripts. Nowhere in my official UC Davis record does it show that I know the key to getting wine stains out of a white tablecloth, how to play “Key to the Highway” by Big Bill Broonzy or whom you should contact if you drop your keys down a sewer. Yet I learned all those things during my years at Davis.

I also learned how to negotiate a roundabout, a skill that was crucial in subsequent travels to Europe, how to outwit parking patrols and how to execute a wicked wall-hugging racquetball serve.
At the Davis farmers’ market, I learned about the pleasures of shopping for fresh produce. Although at first I would buy only tomatoes and corn—the vegetables I recognized—after a while I began trying recipes for some of the “exotic” foods offered by the vendors. (To give an idea of my culinary upbringing, when I told my mother I had made a dish using eggplant, she asked, “Is it true they’re purple?”) While at Davis, I bought the first of what would be many cookbooks, and I discovered how enjoyable cooking can be.

In encounters with the campus bureaucracy, I learned about the power of secretaries. They can guide you through a bewildering thicket of regulations, they can solve seemingly insurmountable problems with a phone call, or if you annoy them, they can shrug, smile and provide no more information than a sphinx. When the secretary of my department suggested that I apply for the exchange program to France because no one else had done so, it changed my life.

I learned that endings are never quite how you think they will be. Each quarter I imagined that I would feel euphoric after finals, but I never did. Instead I felt drained, and I usually “celebrated” by cleaning my apartment and doing laundry.

At Davis, I learned how to say hello and goodbye. A university’s population is constantly changing. You make new friends in the fall only to have old ones leave in the spring. Each year offers lessons in loss.

My degree suggests my education at UC Davis was in American literature, but I know better.