As I was taking a study break while writing my final paper of the semester I came across an old picture I instagrammed at the end of my freshman year. (Yes I was stalking myself, and yes I made it all the way back to 2014). It was in sepia, the edges were blurred, I had a low 32 likes. It was a picture of one of the plaques on a bench on campus. I remember this day. I took a picture of this bench while I was waiting for my friend to walk out of her Holy Cross dorm. (If you’ve never taken the opportunity to walk around Saint Mary’s with a couple close friends and talk about whatever it is going on in your life, I strongly suggest you take it.) The plaque was engraved, “In honor of Saint Mary’s College…a place where dreams, memories, and lifelong friendships are made. We are eternally grateful for you.”
I’m trying to transplant myself back in that moment. I was nineteen. About to leave my first year of college behind. A year where I met some of my forever-friends, the year I decided what I really wanted to major in, not what I always thought I should major in, the year I decided I was going to take my home-body self and make her study abroad in Rome that next fall. And obviously that year, that moment, had meant enough to me that I needed to take a picture of that quote right then and there, and put it on my Instagram only to be rediscovered by me two and a half years later, as I’m curled up in bed watching the snowfall out the window, simultaneously wishing for this week to hurry by and for this year to slow down.
That quote. It means something different to me now then it meant to me freshman year.
“We are eternally grateful for you.” I am, Saint Mary’s.
I am grateful that you placed my friends in my classes, in the dining hall, in a hotel in Rome, on the 4th floor of LeMans. Thank you for the laughter, the wine nights, the deep conversations and the Taco Bell drive-thrus. Thank you for group chats and memes and Snapchat streaks. Thank you for turning any surface into a dancing surface. Thank you, each of you, for being you.
I am grateful for the Communication Studies department, who has allowed me to discover my passions and speak my voice. Thank you Susan for your knowledge and constant reminders of how lucky we are to be at Saint Mary’s. Thank you Kramer for making me think, for reading over every version of my senior comp, for saying “we” when talking about women in class because “you’ve been at Saint Mary’s long enough” and, a bonus, for saying “Pimping All Over the World” five times in one class. Thanks Colleen for understanding the importance of a McDonald’s Diet Coke and for making any comm theory make sense with an analogy about Baby Belle. Thank you Marne for teaching me how to learn, how to listen, and how to be.
I am grateful for an internship with the Saint Mary’s Media Relations office next semester.
I am grateful to lead our Her Campus chapter.
And most importantly, I am grateful that I am here to write about it all.
As this last week of the semester wraps up, I have found myself so emotional. Maybe it’s the Christmas season, maybe it’s my senior comp, maybe it’s the friendships, the inspiring professors, or the way LeMans looks after the first snowfall. I can’t pinpoint it. But that quote, it helps. It grounds me. It makes sense to me. It feels good to remember that whatever is going in our world- personal, interpersonal, academic, professional- we’ll always have Saint Mary’s: the place where dreams, memories, and lifelong friendships are made. And for that, I am grateful. Cheers to one more semester.