A month into classes and it seems like everyone is sick, midterms have somehow started already, and the weather plummeted fast. I caught a cold earlier this week and the combination of staying up way later than I should and not eating too well has kept me in a physical funk this time.
(my friend’s dog, blu!)
I just can’t believe we went from sunny skies and warm weather to this dramatically cold in such a short amount of time. Does this happen every year? I guess it has been, but I also hadn’t been in Boston for the fall since junior year so it also feels like I hadn’t seen this campus go through this season for the first time in a while.
This time last year, I was spending my semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. Going to study in Europe was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made!! I’m thinking back to all the traveling I did that semester, with my Wellesley friends and new friends I’d made in Copenhagen, the weekends I spent relaxing with my host family, and the super light courseload at DIS … and I immediately am urged to encourage all of my younger friends at Welles to take a semester off from the Wellesley grind and take that passion and drive elsewhere for a bit. This school trains you well to become a thorough and thoughtful student, which I am so grateful for, but there are some lessons that can only be learned from getting lost in Helsinki or traveling alone in Vienna.
My best friend Kat and I went on a date for the first time in a long time last weekend, and talked a lot about our time at Wellesley so far. The two of us met our first hour on campus during international student orientation, and since then we’ve been through so much. We also realized that throughout our entire Wellesley experience, we’ve lived ridiculously close together. We lived in a crowded little room in Tower Court our sophomore year, last year we lived across the road from eachother in the same mirroring rooms in Beebe and Shafer, and now we live right next to eachother in Tower on the same hallway as three of our other close friends.
Because we’re around one another all the time, it’s become rare of us to go off campus together and make a day of it. But I’m so happy we took time last weekend to do that and officially start off our senior year together. We went to a bar out in Allston and sampled beers to our hearts’ content, we hungout at my friends apartment in town, then came back to Wellesley to finish our night off with pizza bagels at the Hoop, one of my favorite spots on campus. The Hoop is a student cooperative (run by Wellesley students entirely!!) and it’s the only place that has food on/around campus past 10pm.
I’ve become so comfortable on this campus, it’s so odd to think that this time next year I’ll be somewhere entirely different. But there’s so much that Wellesley has taught me in the past three years, and has brought me so many people – like Kat – who I can’t imagine life without anymore, I also am so excited for what’s to come during my last year here.