Look, I love Wellesley. I love the classes, I love the campus, I love my friends here. I also love getting the heck off campus over breaks. I especially love it during Spring Break, when the midterms are mostly over and finals are still on the horizon and it’s just warm enough to sit on a beach somewhere without a coat on. Bliss.
My first two years, I went home to hang out with my family. My junior year, my family came to visit me while I was studying abroad in the UK. (Parents + desire to travel + willingness to pay for things = much fancier break than in the fall, when I was funding the hostels/Airbnbs on my own. Not going to lie, I’m pretty sure one place I stayed just shoved a bunkbed into an old storage closet.) This year, I decided I would do the traditional thing–get a group of friends together, fly somewhere sunny, chill on the beach for a while. I had a hard time figuring out specifics, though, and as spring break inched closer, I began to think I would just end up hanging out with my parents again.
Then my friend won the Wellesley in Entertainment Screenwriting Competition. Wellesley in Entertainment is a group of alums who helped set up this competition a few years ago. The winner gets flown out to LA over spring break for a bunch of networking experiences and opportunities to sit in on–I don’t know–movie stuff? I’m sure it was very cool if you know what that stuff is. I pulled in a mutual friend and we asked if it would be okay if we kind of tagged along? It was!
First stage of a classic Wellesley spring break: Hanging out in the Wellesley dorms for a few days. Our break was over a week long this year, and since the Wellesley in Entertainment trip was only going to be in LA from Monday to Friday–and we definitely couldn’t afford to fly out for the whole time–we decided to schedule our break for the same stretch. That meant spending Thursday through Sunday night at Wellesley. Having campus (mostly) to ourselves was pretty great. I walked around the lake, applied for a bunch of jobs (sigh), and crammed in all my homework so I wouldn’t have anything to do over break. Wellesley keeps the dining halls open for the first few days of break, which was very helpful. Between some instant mac from CVS (don’t tell my parents) and some fresh fruit from the dining hall that I had stashed away (don’t tell the dining hall folks), I stayed fed until stage two: LA.
Monday morning, we flew out to Los Angeles. My contest-winning friend was off to stay with an alum, and my other friend and I went straight to the beach–that’s where the picture from up top is from. We crammed a lot in a few days!
Whale watching:
Hiking down some bluffs covered in wildflowers:
Hung out in a very cool bookstore:
Hiked up to Griffith Observatory and got a good view of the Hollywood sign:
Among a bunch of other things! My friend who won the contest managed to get away from all the fancy Hollywood networking stuff to join us for the trip to the bookstore and for a visit to a bar that was library themed. The drinks were themed too:
Not a whole lot of partying (well, none), but we all preferred going to see whales, a comedy show, museums, and stuff like that than the traditional spring break scene. I was sad when we had to go home, but stage three of break–visiting my parents for a few days before returning to Wellesley–was really refreshing. We spent a lot of it just sitting around catching up and talking about my time in LA. In classic parent fashion, they wanted to see all the photos–even the really bad ones that will absolutely never make it on this blog! Then I had to get on a bus and return to Wellesley. At that point, I felt ready to come back. (After a week of classes, I’m reconsidering that.)