You can tell a lot about a person from the decorations in their dorm room. It was one of the first jokes I made to my roommate freshman year. I had very few personal items in our small room, but my roommate’s personality radiated through her signs, her taste in wallpaper and especially her printed photos.
The wall next to my roommate’s desk was covered with pictures of her high-school friends and her family. The stark contrast between her personalized space and my bare one made me look like a sociopath, so I paid $5 to print out fifty photos of my high school friends. The small change made a huge difference in the atmosphere of the room but it was odd to have physical pictures. It seemed like something my parents would do, collecting pictures to keep in a black box in the back of their closets to pull out at family events.
Nonetheless, this year my roommate and I decided to step up our room decor. My roommate printed out 230 photos and, with the help of three of our friends, created an assembly line to stick tape and blue tac on the backs of photos for me and my roommate to put on the wall. This wall, covered with pictures of all of our friends during freshman year, tells a unique story that is interpreted in many different ways. The memories behind each photo make it worth the couple of cents it costs to print.
The shift back to physical photos from digital ones displays a tangible difference in memory preservation. For one, if my phone suddenly destroys everything I have, the printed photos are still around as reminders years from now. Additionally, there is something so satisfying about looking at the pictures in a photo album or in their sleeve from when they were first printed.
The preservation of college memories is an important goal, as many people spend the rest of their lives in contact with college friends through personal relationships and reunions. However, it seems hard to reminisce with pictures scattered around phones, laptops and Facebook pages.
My friend Maureen has decided to go one step further with sharing her college experience and showing off her friendships. A student from Dublin, Maureen makes vlogs that are uploaded to Youtube to share with her friends from home. This format allows her to introduce her home friends to her college friends while also portraying life at an American Catholic university.
Her most recent upload shows a typical college game day. With seven of us recording horizontal videos for her to edit, Maureen was able to take a whole day of events and condense it into under four minutes. Her other videos include different parts of the previous semesters, studying abroad, Thanksgiving with her roommate and reunions with her friends in Ireland.
The creation and circulation of Maureen’s videos are crucial to our friends. Besides the viewing parties we have when they are first created (and the several dozen times after), the vlogs portray a side of college that pictures cannot do justice. It puts spirit into our endeavors so that we can share these memories now (with our non-college friends) and enjoy them later in life, whether it is a few months or a few years from now.
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Image 1 provided by the author, 2