Seven hours down Broadway

John Bush came to New York from Memphis with less than a week of city experience and no plan for being alone in it. Within weeks he had taken on too much, burned out and retreated to his dorm. He calls it a unique feeling: physically surrounded by millions of people and still short of a single meaningful connection.

What pulled him out was ordinary. A job, some clubs and, most of all, a run club that carried him to Carroll Gardens, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Astoria. By the end of the year he wanted one last long look, so with seven hours before his flight he rode north and started walking Broadway, a winding 13-mile avenue, from Inwood toward the Battery.

Each stretch handed him a lesson. At an Inwood deli he remembered how nervous he used to be ordering at bodegas, and how long it took to learn that the counter staff did not care where he was from.

nobody really cares that you are a transplant

John Bush, Washington Square News magazine editor

In Central Park the picnickers made him a little angry before they made him wise: if everyone at NYU seems to be out-hustling you, find a place where nobody is keeping score. Midtown, crowded and corporate, suggested the opposite warning. Do not feel you must settle on a path in week one, and spend some time off LinkedIn.

Greenwich Village brought the practical problem. NYU has around 60,000 students, he writes, and few classic hangout spots to run into them at, so the friend you meet in the elevator is easy to lose. His fix is simple: swap numbers on the spot and make a plan within days. By SoHo he was 13.5 miles in by his phone’s count, one day after a statistics exam, and thinking about the support he had leaned on: counselling, his resident adviser, a calendar and a lot of grace.

He reached the water with the Statue of Liberty ahead of him and no time to linger. The flight was waiting. The piece is the personal-journey entry in Welcome Home, the annual magazine the student newspaper writes for incoming first-years.