Good evening~
As I stand in the Sports Center’s training room, thigh-deep in ice cold water, bent from the waist to type in a decidedly awkward fashion, I figured it was high time to write about my weekly activities! And what a good week it has been. While most of my friends are frazzled around the edges, because their classes have exams this week before finals period, I have been blessed with a calm end of the semester. This has left me time to enjoy track, including spending quality time in the ice bath so that my shins are ready :).
This Saturday is NEWMACs, our big race of the season! Unlike swimming, in which NEWMACs are a four-day affair, track has condensed the meet into one Saturday. I am a bit confused as to how they have done this, and am curious to see how they do so tomorrow. I am running the 400 meter and 4 x 400 meter relay, both of which I hope to get best times in.
Much has gone on this week besides track though. Wednesday was Wellesley’s Ruhlman Conference, one of two conferences that are held annually. Tanner Conference is in the fall, and is a day-long event in which students who studied abroad give 20-minute long presentations on their work. Ruhlman is in the spring, and this conference is for students who are presenting their theses or research they have done over the year. The food is marvelous, we have the day off, and I have really enjoyed going to the different presentations. On Wednesday I went to talks about the transformative powers of a superman cape in preschoolers, the epigenetics of obesity, the monetary effects of the recent sex abuse scandal on the Catholic Church, the impact of American Army and Marine women’s outreach groups in Afghanistan, how effective the recent trials in Sierra Leone were, the effect of extroversion on ability to understand facial expressions, feminism in regards to aging Korean American women, and a few more besides. As always, I am learning that Wellesley women are extremely accomplished in what they do. All the performances were well-planned and executed, the presenters were calm and knowledgeable, and the fact that many of these girls had interviewed hundreds of people in diverse areas to accumulate their research information was incredibly impressive. If anyone’s in the area, I’d very much recommend attending Wellesley’s Ruhlman Conference: there are exceptional student presentations.
Then there’s of course the shenanigans I got up to last Friday night! Tiffany, Gabby, Grace, Kendra, and I (all swim/dive friends) went show hopping: Karina (next year’s swim co-captain) was performing in Wushu’s martial arts performance, and Keelin (another swimming teammate) was performing in the Tupelos’ spring singing concert. Both were marvelous, and there’s links to Wushu’s performance here and the Tupelos here. I think this was the first Wushu’s performance I attended since their initial show for prospective students, and this is the second a-capella concert I’ve attended at Wellesley. Both impressed me!
I then ran through quite a bit of rain to attend Sarah Chen’s birthday party. She had made cupcakes and bought an ice cream cake, and it was fun chatting with the track team and meeting some new people. I’d have to say that talk quickly turned to sports (crew, track, etc.) due to the overwhelming majority of athletes present. This fact reminds me of a conversation I had a few days ago about athletes in general: I had sat down with a stranger (another Wellesley student) at dinner on Tuesday. Unlike my usual conversation with people doing work at dinner (“May I sit?” “Of course!” I then proceed to inhale my food because I have to run to class, while she goes back to her laptop), Meredith, a junior, introduced herself and actually had a good conversation with me. Upon hearing I was an athlete, she told me she was surprised, as “don’t be offended, but you usually travel in packs.” I smiled because I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it is true that I usually have all my meals, including breakfast, with swimmers or runners. I knew that most of my friends were athletes, but I hadn’t thought about it from the other side before. I wonder if it’s like this at all schools, that the athletes are their own community—and even looking back at high school I think this is true in general. As a lacrosse athlete once told me, “if they have a green waterbottle [referring to the free water bottles Wellesley annually gives to its varsity athletes], they’re your friend.”
I was thus late to class, but it was a great talk for me. Gives me something to think about too— especially considering Wellesley’s community as a whole. I’ve heard from some that Wellesley doesn’t have a great community feel (one of my friends, for example, has told me that she misses the energy of school-wide football games), but I thought the opposite when I decided to come here, and still think the opposite. Despite my wish that the school rallied more around their athletics, this was precisely what I complained about in high school: too much focus on athletics instead of schoolwork. And Wellesley knows its schoolwork. Every Wellesley student is bonded that way, and that connection is exhibited in the way students, professors, alumna, coaches, and staff all reach out to other members of this community. It’s a unique community, certainly, in that we relate to each other mainly through the academics that occupy our lives, but I think it’s a tight community, with everyone devoted to helping each other learn, enjoy their experience, and accomplish their potential.
Drawing back from my musings, I have to mention that Sunday morning track lift was a blast. Last Sunday we played ultimate Frisbee for two hours (SO much fun, even though I cannot play ball sports and am scared of burning, and thus spent most of the time applying sunblock and skipping back and forth along the field laughing), and this Sunday we lifted with the amazing Coach Meg (our track coach). Coach Meg does cross-fit, which I haven’t really heard of but I know is very intense. As a result, she can do all sorts of “tricks,” which includes handstand pushups, no arm cartwheels, using her arms to go from a sitting position to a handstand, flips, insane ab workouts, and other very cool things which I totally do not have the muscle for. She has been progressively teaching us how to do handstand pushups, and I can now do it with a ball under my head. Other challenges have been jumping straight up three and half feet, which the whole sprint team participates in. There’s nothing quite like fun athletic challenges with no expectations, which appear pretty rarely in varsity sports (mostly, we’re just training, which makes moments like these all the more valuable :)).
Wednesday was interesting because I got to participate in Wellesley’s Housing Process for the first time. Tamara, my roommate for next year, and I had gotten lucky in being housed in Munger, the dorm that is “five minutes away from everything.” How Wellesley does housing is that each person is randomly assigned a lottery number within their class, and this number (or its average if you’re a sophomore and thus need a roommate) determines both what dorm you are assigned and what room number within the dorm. Tamara and I both had solidly mediocre numbers for the sophomore class, but we were at the very bottom of the list when it came time to choose rooms in Munger, meaning that we just barely squeaked in. Many of my other friends are “unhoused,” meaning they are assigned to rooms after everyone else is done, and there have been other difficulties. I think that like the class-choosing process here (which is very competitive because class sizes are kept small at Wellesley), housing is made difficult because pretty much everyone lives on campus. I wonder if there are ways to make these processes easier, but without doing away with small class sizes and good housing. It’s difficult to know, and I do know that most people are happy with their classes and dorms (I certainly am, and feel fortunate) despite the occasional horror stories.
And now our final happy event: my dad came out to Boston for a business trip on Wednesday and Thursday! Since I hadn’t seen him since a week during Christmas break, it was wonderful to catch up on what was going on back home. I’m still in the minority in that I rarely talk to my parents (we email and call occasionally, but much less than most. This is especially true as many Wellesley students come from the Northeast, and their parents thus come to visit or they go home every once in a while), so it was great to hear about what my sisters were up to, my dad’s work, and my mom’s usual gardening adventures. He took me out to dinner twice, bought me fruit (YES! Strawberries, blueberries, plums, and grapes: be jealous, Wellesley. Wellesley’s usually pretty good with fruit, but they very much lack the listed ones, at least the non-frozen kind.), and listened to me babble for a while on why Wellesley’s going great. He was surprised that I hadn’t passed through my “honeymoon period” yet, which I didn’t know existed for college life. But I told him I was still happy, and that even if I wasn’t, I’ve made it a personal goal to remember every day how fortunate I am to be here, where I have such opportunities to find things to love. I can’t believe the end of my first year of college is approaching: it’s so astounding, and yet I’m ready for a break before I come back next year and do it all over again!
So here was a long blog with two whole paragraphs of my personal musings for you :). I hope it was helpful, and if it wasn’t, please comment and tell me something different to ramble about! Also, I’d like to wish all of those high school seniors who have to decide which schools they’re attending in three days the very best. Know that you’ll most likely enjoy whatever school you choose, and that you can always make the best of whatever you decide!
Comments and questions are welcome! Hope you have a great night.
Sincerely,
Monica
