studentwise:
Time and
Transformation
OLLEGE IS SUPPOSED to become your second home the moment you move in, but I will admit that Swarthmore hasn’t always felt like home to me.
As a writer and editor for The Phoenix, I found a group I loved, yet my reporting sometimes reinforced the feeling that I was an observer, rather than a participant. It was the self-assured campus activists, leaders, and achievers I would interview that embodied Swarthmore. Not me. That’s how I felt, anyway.
It was a hot, buggy Friday night when some friends and I took our last chance to wander the campus we’d grown familiar with over the years. As we approached Parrish West, it was as if I could see myself and my Phoenix co-editors bleary-eyed but content, streaming out of that door at 2 a.m., or 3 a.m., or 4 a.m., in some pre-pandemic parallel universe. I remembered the excitement of Wednesday publication night, the buzz of conversation that energized the room even as it became outlandishly late. When we found our way to Crumhenge, I thought of the times I had run up that gravel hill and flown over mossy rocks by the Crum Creek trying to keep up with my friends on a long run. The sweeping garden near the president’s house reminded me of when I had told Professor Megan Brown that I thought I was too burned out to finish finals and she had predicted, correctly, that I’d feel differently after resting under the cherry blossoms for a while.
Despite the tumultuous times that have characterized the last four years, so many good memories tie me to Swarthmore. Before, we complained about the claustrophobia of campus, how once you met someone one time, you both felt obligated to say hi every time you saw each other until the day one of you graduated or transfered. But being off campus, both during my time studying abroad in France and during this remote semester, I’ve come to immensely appreciate our community. I never knew how much I would miss seeing new classmates in the line for the Science Center coffee bar, how lucky I had been to have time with friends built into all of my Sharples mealtimes, how helpful it had been to be able to pop into my professors’ offices when I needed to talk.
How does one casually bump into someone in the infinite space of the digital universe that now separates us?
The people I thought of during my nocturnal fall walk are people I still “see” on a regular basis, some living just upstairs from me in our apartment building a few blocks from campus, some thousands of miles away. They’re the professors who met with me at all times of the day when I needed help or simply a pep talk, who emailed to check in on me during the lockdown, and who, like Professor Rachel Buurma ’99, encouraged me to pursue my dream of becoming a reporter. They’re the staff members who smiled at me when I was a sleep-deprived zombie, the classmates who struck up conversations all over campus, or, now, over social media. They’re the friends who comfort me, who read my sometimes-terrible drafts, and with whom I stay up talking about every possible subject.
In a few months, I will leave behind the Phoenix office, my favorite study rooms at McCabe, and my Crum Woods hideouts. But I’ll take with me a new family that will remain in my life as I continue to pursue a career in digital and data journalism.
I’ll be a visitor again — but Swarthmore will always be home.