The two hour car ride from Redding to New London, Connecticut seemed alarmingly short on that first day. I watched the sunrise silently from the backseat, tuning out my parents’ banter and wiping my nervous, clammy hands on the car seat.
I had spent the last week in a perpetual state of panic, making last minute, late night Target trips with my mother and staying up until 2 am reorganizing boxes and suitcases to ensure that I hadn’t forgotten anything as I packed.
The very idea of college terrified me right from the start. As someone who was shy, quiet, and a little nerdy, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to make friends. I was worried that my roommates would be mean, weird, unfriendly, or too friendly. I was placed in a quad, which had not been part of my plan, and was in itself a terrifying prospect, to be perfectly honest.
After a quick (by which I mean extensive and immediate) investigation of their Facebook profiles, I found that they all seemed breathtakingly normal, and I decided that I was definitely going to end up being the weird roommate.
For the duration of the car ride on move-in day, all I could think about was how to say hello without sounding like an overly nervous child, which was how I felt.
As it turned out, all of my roommates are lovely people and we get along fantastically. We figured out how to live with each other pretty quickly, creating our little ecosystem, learning how to share a room, and spending considerable amounts of time in the same small space as each other.
We all have our little quirks, but it works. Someone always turns the heat way up; someone always comes back at 2 am from the library; someone always opens the windows, and someone else always closes them.
But it works. Somehow.
Orientation was a pretty big blur. Everything happened too fast, and in such a short amount of time. At the academic fair I spontaneously decided to get my education certificate and left with all paperwork from the certificate program’s table without ever having the intention before that day of ever taking any pedagogy classes.
I was so set on continuing French, taking the 300 levels that would make my mother, a French teacher, proud. Instead, I enrolled in Italian 101. I spend a lot of time in that class mumbling in frustration because I can’t use French words while trying to write sentences and I forgot how to say “with” and “lettuce” in Italian again.
Things were not playing out the way I thought they would.
Living on my own turned out to be less about being able to watch Netflix whenever I wanted and stay out as late as I pleased and more about having no one here to tell me that I can’t have Lucky Charms every day for breakfast.
I started to feel pretty well adjusted until the racial tensions of the campus took the spotlight, and I realized that Conn’s atmosphere was a lot more complicated and not quite as friendly and inclusive as I had been led to believe. As as white student, I had been unforgivably ignorant of the experiences of minority students here, and their experiences in the world in general. I came to Conn blind, but it has been an eye opening semester.
I attended a series of events, hanging in the back, listening, trying to understand. I feel like I’m not doing anything to change what needs to be changed, and I know a lot of my friends do to, but I think that it’s important to understand what’s going on. It’s the first step towards us actually helping everyone on campus feel like they belong here (which they most definitely do, we all worked our butts off for this opportunity).
The fact that administration did nothing to address these issues on race and free speech during our absurdly long orientation (ours was days longer than orientations at any other NESCAC) is a problem. They needed to put a considerable amount of time aside to make sure that this incoming class was actually prepared for the campuses racial climate. We should have spent less time talking about how it’s against honor code to use racial slurs and more time talking about the fact that they had been written in stalls in the bathroom in Cro. They should have spent less time telling us that we cannot make offensive jokes, and more time telling us about the intense debates and protests over the idea of hate speech that occurred last semester.
The first time I heard someone say “Pessin” my response was to say “Guzuntight” because I had no idea that that was the name of a professor that was linked to intense racial debates at this school. This is a problem.
Now that the semester is starting to end, I’m mostly focused on surviving my first round of finals with my sanity intact. Papers, presentations, exams, oh my! I have more to do than I have had all year and I’m just not entirely sure how that happened. I’m very tired. I walk around in a perpetual haze of exhaustion from late nights making outlines and studying verb tenses. I twitch a little whenever someone says “coffee” and I almost cry every time I actually can smell some.
Here’s to hoping that next semester will be as eye opening as this one was, if a little less terrifying at the onset. •
