A Soggy prospie. Illustration by Emily Bernstein.
I blame the weather.
For over a week I’ve been bothering some of my fellow tour guides about the rain-swollen clouds threatening Monday’s little blue box on Weather.com. Clinging rather stupidly to hope, I woke on the morning of the first Admitted Students Day this semester with high expectations, only to find Conn wind-whipped, wet and blanketed by heavy fog. I pressed my forehead to my windowpane, glaring out at a slice of campus that just a couple days before had been bathed in spring sunlight.
The problem is, really, that I love being a tour guide a little too much.
Bouncing into admissions, I was happy it was clogged with people who hadn’t been discouraged from showing up by the miserable weather. I helped herd them out onto the soggy lawn where they shuffled into groups, one per guide, and I whisked a small crowd onto south campus, gushing my congratulations to the newly admitted students. They half-smiled inexpressively and muttered.
I get it. It’s always a bit depressing when I’m doing my spiel about how Tempel Green, as the center of our campus, is where students play, work and lie out in the sun when it’s either encrusted with a foot of snow or rain-washed and muddy. But I thought admitted students could mentally peek under the veil of fog and catch a glimpse of the beautiful college that could so easily be theirs (albeit in nicer weather).
Instead, they dragged their feet like high school juniors on the nineteenth of a twenty-school circuit.
I discovered that no matter how excited they may have been deep down, admitted students are people too, and people get bummed by gross sticky air and blasts of wind to the face.
This is an opinions article, but it’s about a rather mundane and obvious opinion, and that opinion is that bad weather sucks. My own Admitted Students Day just a year ago was golden and green, loud with the sounds of flip-flops smacking the sidewalks and colored with crowds of kids outside soaking in the sun. It was idyllic. It was just so college.
Now, it’s depressing to think of the bright, awesome people who may have been unconsciously dissuaded from sending in a deposit to Conn because of a blustery April afternoon. It’s outright annoying to think of the way we are wired to be more glum and unenthusiastic when the sky is gray.
I blame the weather for this dud of a day. The greeters waving signs, cheering at admitted students driving through the front gate and waking up nearly everyone in central campus are a testament to the zeal and hard work of all those involved in this day.
While I stood in Admissions last Monday, watching dejectedly as a tiny, disgruntled group embarked on the last drizzly tour of the afternoon with a single guide, I could not blame anything but the weather for the half-dozen gloomy faces, because Conn is awesome. So were all the people talking excitedly on panels, manning info booths and crouching in the rain to chalk the slicked sidewalks.
It’s hard to jump for joy when everyone’s shoes are squelching with muddy water, so it’s my opinion and my suggestion, please, whoever may control the weather, that the next Admitted Students Day should be sunny and sparkly and springy.
As President Higdon likes to joke, “The weather is this beautiful all the time!” Of course it isn’t, but since we have all experienced Connecticut College in both the bitter throes of winter and the incomparable loveliness of New England springs and falls, we have learned that Conn is always some sort of beautiful in its own way. Prosprective students have not quite figured that out yet.
Regardless of the amount of sunshine today, I entreat all of you to make an appearance outdoors and smile at admitted students, give the hopelessly lost ones directions, and obnoxiously shout, “Come to Conn!” Admitted Students Days are important—not just to an overeager tour guide like me. And maybe try to camp out on the green for a while, throw a Frisbee or two. There’s just something about kids on a green at a college. I’m sure you know what I mean. •
