There may be some misconceptions outside the Wellesley bubble as to our motto. While our official seal has the classic Latin: Non Ministrari, sed Ministrare – not to be ministered unto, but to minister, students would probably argue for a more modern approach: Wellesley College – We’ll sleep when we’re dead. I find the mottos have the same basic principles. Essentially, we work hard and we do well. This idea is by no means foreign to me. My high school’s Latin seal read: finimus pariter renovamusque labores – we finish our work only to begin anew. Students at my high school would joke that the translation was ‘you’ll always have homework.’
This much is still true in college. Having been concussed for about two weeks, my brain is finally back in working order. I spent Fall Break at home in New Jersey with my mom observing the Jewish Holiday Yom Kippur. I came back late Wednesday of last week after visiting a friend of mine from my Israel Birthright trip. After classes and practice Wednesday and Thursday I headed down to Connecticut to spend Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths, with a friend from my Ukraine trip. I came back just in time for practice and Shabbos Friday evening and then very much needed my weekend. TZE went down to manhattan for an alum networking brunch and the Whiptails travelled out to Amherst to play the Pat Bell Memorial tournament. I being injured, spent my weekend with all the books and Latin translations I could manage.
Big/Little Iris family reunited at TZE alum brunch
As I’ve read posts from my fellow bloggers, I too can attest to the fact that in college there is a ton of reading. You must quickly learn the skill of skimming and finding main ideas of paragraphs to survive all the scholarly texts on your syllabus. I most recently had to test this out with excerpts from Hobbes’ Leviathan. To give you an idea of what it’s like being an English major at Wellesley, this is my reading list for the week:
- Julius Caesar – Shakespeare
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
- Various T.S. Eliot poems
- The Golden Ass – translated by Robert Graves
With the exception of Middlemarch, I should be getting through these by the end of next week. I’ll also be doing some Latin translating of the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche from The Golden Ass.
As you can imagine, the weekend is precious to Wellesley students. Weekends are for caramel apple sundaes at J.P. Licks in the ville, pumpkin spice lattes from Dunkin’ Donuts, reading in one of the gorgeous common rooms and catching up with your best friends that haven’t seen you in a week because all of you are buried in work. What I value most about the intense and stressful environment at Wellesley is that we’re all in it together. We go here. We’ll all sleep when we’re dead.
For now, we have webcomics. The following is one of my favorites. Please humbly excuse or feel free to laugh at the your mom jokes. I don’t know what kind of audience I’m working with here.
On a lighter note, XKCD seems to have found the answer to bailing out the sleep debt that occurs in college