Memories of Matriculation: A Wellesley Tribute
By Anonymous
When I reflect on my overall Wellesley experience, I find myself feeling mostly blessed, yet a little wanting. I received the world-class education I was promised (though at a hefty financial cost). I was granted access to numerous resources, opportunities, and perspectives. I went to job fairs and workshops, made connections, and saw famous speakers. I took advantage of every paid expense that interested me, and ate all the free food I could.
Yet there were many ways in which I limited myself. I came into Wellesley socially anxious and insecure, confident only in my intelligence and academic merit—they were the reasons I had gotten in, after all. When early on, it proved difficult to make friends in this new environment, my anxiety doubled down. I retreated into what made me comfortable and balked at what made me feel vulnerable.
I never went to a frat party, let alone any party off campus. I seldom took the bus into Cambridge and Boston, or ordered delivery from Domino’s or Lemon Thai. I never maintained a steady friend group, or made a conscious effort to sit with others at lunch. All in all, I feel like I’ve missed out on an important aspect of the quintessential college experience, and coming to terms with that, as well as learning how to combat my intrusive apprehensions, has been a wearisome and at times painful process.
But despite these regrets, my time at Wellesley has been nothing short of a privilege, and I owe many of my favorite moments to the courses I have taken, and what I have taken from them. Thus, true to form, I have decided to recount my Wellesley journey through a selection of my most memorable courses, from my first semester of matriculation, to my last.
The Scientific Revolution, Fall 2017: My first year writing course. On the day of the first class session, a Thursday, I accidentally lock myself outside of my room while getting dressed, and am late as a result. The professor meets me at the door of the classroom and shakes my hand, graciously accepting my apologies of tardiness.
Throughout this course, I watch a documentary on climate change denial, and read texts about Galileo, his theory of heliocentrism, and his conflicts with the Catholic Church. I write papers on scientific innovation’s eternal friction with non-scientific skepticism. I enjoy class discussions about the intersections of science, faith, and intuition, and am praised for my eagerness to share my opinions. This remains something I am inexplicably comfortable doing in academic settings, yet struggle with greatly in virtually all other contexts.
Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World, Spring 2018: I decide to register for this class due to the “Race and Ethnicity” aspect, not the “Classical World” aspect. I’m merely trying to fulfill the multicultural requirement, and initially, I only have a vague guess of the time period in which the Classical World takes place—the Victorian Era, or maybe Pre Colonial times? Not even close. In this Classics course, which ultimately retains five students including myself, I read Homer and Heliodorus, and learn about the early racism of Ancient Greece and Phoenicia. I find that despite my unfamiliarity with classical antiquity, my insights on race as a Black woman prove relevant in any era.
I come to profoundly enjoy the company of my other classmates, three of whom are upperclasswomen and Classics majors. We goof off with the professor in class and have study sessions with refreshments, courtesy of one classmate who works at J.P. Licks. We go tunneling on the eve of my 19th birthday, which is entirely a coincidence but appreciated nonetheless. I feel somewhat awkward even mentioning my birthday—it feels like bragging, somehow—but their responses are celebratory.
Short Narrative, Fall 2018: Prior to taking this course, I’d long thought of myself as a strong writer, yet I’d hardly ever tried my hand at short fiction. In this course, we all sit at a conference table, and take turns writing and critiquing each other’s short stories every week. I write three stories: the first about a child of immigrants getting ready to leave her childhood home, the second about a grieving teenage girl who reconnects with an old friend, and the third about a neurotic adolescent’s first experiences with infatuation, featuring an anxiety disorder for which I had received a flimsy diagnosis.
While ostensibly fictional, these stories are, in essence, some of the most self-involved pieces I’ve ever written. Yet as time goes by, I realize that the same could be said of all my classmates’ stories. These fictitious accounts of made-up events are unabashedly about ourselves, and undeniably real. My most treasured comment from a classmate comes as a response to my third story. She says that my writing style is “manipulative,” and makes her grasp at the page, demanding more. As someone who’s always struggled to read texts without zoning out, this is perhaps the best compliment that I could have possibly received.
The Black Church, Spring 2019: Since attending Wellesley, I’ve found myself reflecting almost constantly on the idea of social inequity, and not just because of my progressive classmates. This is the first time in nearly a decade that I’ve attended a predominantly white school, and I often consider the idea that my Blackness has contributed to the on-and-off isolation I’ve been feeling. I realize that I’m not quite used to being viewed as a minority, to being perceived largely by White people whose subconscious biases may overpower their good intentions. As I walk Wellesley’s breathtakingly beautiful grounds, I carry an understanding that those who walked them first did not intend for someone like me to do the same. That is the world from which this institution is born. Somehow, I must find sanctuary within it.
I take the Black Church for an arts credit, as well as for the opportunity to finally take an Africana Studies course. It is here that I learn the importance of referring to enslaved Africans as “enslaved Africans,” not “slaves,” lest we forget that these people were never inherently submissive, but were in fact doctors, and teachers, and scientists, and artists, with hopes and dreams and humanity, stripped away through Western cruelty and violence. This course is heartbreaking, and rejuvenating, and the professor is an unbelievably kind-hearted woman who meets me with unending mercy as I fight to juggle final exams and financial stressors.
Multivariable Calculus, Fall 2019: I consider neither math nor the hard sciences to be strengths of mine, yet as I need one more unit of either distribution, I decide to go for what I think will be the lesser of two evils.
I’m not too fond of Multivariable Calculus, even though the professor happens to be absolutely lovely. Days consist of convincing myself not to skip class sessions, and nights consist of long hours spent doing homework problems while listening to reruns of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I don’t know if it's a distraction issue, or if my brain just can’t engage very well with problems that lack human context, but this is not something at which I’m excelling. Nonetheless, I take pride in leaving my intellectual comfort zone, and succeed in passing the course, albeit not with flying colors. All in all, this is a good semester, and I’m happy that the impulse to define myself by my grades has weakened.
Women Writing the 21st Century, Spring 2020: This is perhaps the most quintessentially Wellesley course that I take during my time here, and I utterly adore it. It is here that I cultivate my love of nonfiction essays, and write what I humbly consider to be my magnum opus (or at least, tied with my other magnum opuses), a paper on the merits and malleability of truth. It contains a ridiculous reference to fanfiction that I think is just great.
Notably, this is the semester that we’re all sent home due to COVID-19. This leaves me upset and ill at ease; I am finally making serious leeway in my quest to overcome my social anxiety, and a pandemic is likely not going to help me maintain my progress. I decide to express my worries in a piece for the course, and am touched when a classmate reaches out to express her sympathies. Ultimately, this semester teaches me that people want to know what I have to say, and thus I should write loudly and without inhibition.
Writing Character-Driven Prose, Fall 2021: By far, the most exciting aspect of this course is that I’m taking it in Bath, England. I have decided to take advantage of the new two-term system, and spend a term studying abroad, something I’d long thought wasn’t in the cards for me. I stay in a handsome townhouse, tall and narrow with no landings, with three other Wellesley students, one of whom happens to be a close friend. There are aspects of the stay that are less than ideal: the United Kingdom goes into lockdown on the same day we arrive in the country, the two weeks of quarantine upon arrival become predictably claustrophobic, my social anxiety continues to plague me periodically, my initial grocery order doesn’t go through, forcing me to live on buttered toast for a week, and my phone stops working my second day there.
But I can see the Bath Abbey from my bedroom window, and am walking distance from the Roman Baths, the River Avon, the Royal Crescent, and countless cafes, shops, and open green fields. I enjoy weekly tours around the city with my classmates and a comically loveable tour guide. I spend hours walking the streets of the Southgate Shopping Centre, noting differences between American and British commercialism and trying as many uniquely British foods as I can. As time goes by, my housemates and I inevitably grow closer, and I cherish the moments we have together, whether they be spent in our shared kitchen trading stories of our adolescence, or in a socially distanced restaurant, sipping on cocktails and eating mandatory substantial meals. I am eternally grateful for this whole experience, and for the effect it has on my writing; suddenly, I am bursting with the need to write something… ineffable. A romance, or an epic mystery, or both. Something transcendent, iridescent.
I never end up writing such a story, but nonetheless, I am forever thankful for this privileged respite. To this day, I am in awe of those seven weeks.
Intermediate Macroeconomic Analysis, Spring 2021: This is the last course I need to finish off my Economics major. Ideally, I will complete it with a passing grade, graduate, and then begin my post-grad job shortly thereafter.
This is a weird semester. After nearly a year away from campus, I have returned, while most of my friends have not. As a senior who’s fortunate enough to have a job after graduation, I can’t find it in me to be stressed about school matters. I spend my days going through the motions, scrolling through TikToks, and strolling around the lake in my free time. My only real worry is one that I’ve had many times before, that I’ve squandered my youth, my last chance to be wild and rambunctious in my life, in the name of maintaining an all too important semblance of dignity. This thought gnaws at my contentment, makes me panic at random moments throughout the week. I hate knowing that I can’t change the past, and I hate having to remind myself that the decisions I made then were products of a past mentality, the best I could do given the way I saw the world. Nonetheless, I am undeniably lucky to have had the experiences I did.
As I walk to and from my final economics course, I listen to a podcast called You’re Wrong About, where two journalists explore misunderstood media phenomena and interrogate how and why they were misconstrued by the public. Episode topics include the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the obesity epidemic, and “political correctness.” As I cross the academic quad in all of its pristineness, my ears are flooded with reports of the deceptively vast reaches of white supremacist, ableist, capitalist patriarchy.
One thing I have always known throughout my four years at Wellesley, is that I’ve been granted a temporary stay in a bubble of immense privilege, surrounded by a world whose inequities grow more obvious and pernicious by the day. What else could I possibly do but utilize the privilege that I have and the knowledge that I have amassed, toward the erosion of inequity, if not the facilitation of liberation? And who knows, maybe I’ll attend some parties along the way. Ongoing anxieties aside, I am unequivocally ready to graduate.
For information about publishing articles anonymously, please contact the Editor-in-Chief (swentzel@wellesley.edu). From the April/May 2021 issue.