A poster of flowers in front of Founders Hall sags on the wall in front of my desk at home. To its left are two clippings from a 2013 Boston Globe article about Wellesley’s cross country and track and field coach, “Babington ending long run as coach.” Other decorations have gone up and down, but these have stayed. For a while, they offered an incentive to keep working hard. And now they’re a reminder of how proud my younger self would be to see me at Wellesley.
Wellesley first came on my radar in sixth grade, when I found out that my favorite teacher was an alum. I didn’t even know it was a historically women’s college, or what liberal arts meant, but I decided I would come to Wellesley.
In eighth grade, I went to Junior Open Campus just for fun. (You can do that when you live twenty minutes away.) The theater professor whose mock class I attended mentioned to the Dean of Admission that he’d had an eighth grader in class. Later that day, my mom asked Dean St. John a question and was met with, “Oh, you’re the mom of the eighth-grader!”
I did not obsess over college. SATs and GPAs and APs were still just acronyms to me. But Wellesley represented where I could go if I kept working hard.
Over the years, Wellesley transformed from an idea to a possibility. When I began my college search, I put together a list of twenty schools to consider, and Wellesley still topped it. It almost lost to a warmer, sunnier counterpart, but the convenience of staying with my state health insurance and the financial freedom of not having student loans eventually won out.
I wanted to be at a historically women’s college. I wanted small classes and close relationships with professors, a beautiful campus, and access to the city. I came to study a wide range of topics, some of which I’d never heard of. Wellesley alumni always rave about their alma mater. And so far, it’s been everything I imagined and more: making friends with other injured athletes in the training room, stopping by office hours to say hi, having my guitar lesson outside on a sunny day. If I’m sitting at lunch and hear folks talking about something interesting at the next table, I’m comfortable introducing myself and jumping in. And we have a lake! Let that sink in.
Online classes are not Wellesley. I miss dining hall dinners with friends, early morning workouts with my team, sitting in a semicircle and discussing the readings with my writing class. There are three more weeks left of the semester, and while I continue to learn, I feel like most of Wellesley ended when we all left a month ago. The best of Wellesley isn’t the syllabi. It’s the discussions, the community, the people.