Aaron Ojalvo

A South Floridian who had no idea UVA even existed until he was 17, Aaron Ojalvo has become a bona-fide expert on all things UVA and Jefferson in his first two years as a student. From giving tours of Monticello in the summer, to bringing the University Guide Service on board in its support for the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers, Aaron shows as much spirit as CavMan himself. We asked him to give us some more details about his time here. Here’s how it went.

Year:  2nd

Major: Political and Social Thought

What’s it like to give tours at Monticello?

Interns at Monticello work 40 hours a week over the summer, but it’s hard to describe what we do as “work”. Every morning I’d wake up and my first thought would be “AHH I get to go to Monticello today!” It was like that field trip that you looked forward to in elementary school all year… but everyday. I’d drive up the mountain listening to The Avett Brothers and spend the next eight hours speaking to little old ladies and their little old husbands about Jefferson, about his family, his home, and the hypocrisy that the mountaintop has come to represent. More often than not, because I look like I’m twelve and can’t grow much facial hair, tourists were skeptical right off the bat as to whether I would be capable of giving a good tour so it was great having the opportunity to tear down that preconception over and over and over again. Towards the end of the Summer my friend Conor and I set up a standard whereby we measured our success on a scale of tears and tips, you got extra points if you got a grandmother to offer you a granddaughter’s hand in marriage!

Tell us about your work with the Colonnade Ball and the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers project-

The University Guide Service held its first annual Colonnade Ball in the spring on 1989, at the time, the ball was held in order to collect funding for the restoration of the Lambeth Colonnades (which apparently were in worse shape then than they are now). After the project was finished, funding raised at Colonnades over the next few years went to other restoration projects  around ground including the Rotunda and its column capitals. This past year in early conversations with the Colonnade Chairs I brought up the idea of possibly raising funds towards a different project, a project that we’d heard a little about in the past but that we very much wanted to be a part of. That project is the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers. MEL, the committee in charge of the project was put together a few years ago by the NAACP, the Office of African-American Affairs, and the Black Student Alliance. It aims at building a tangible monument that remembers the legacies of the hundreds of enslaved men and women who built and maintained the university up until the time of the Civil War. The goal is a visible monument that leaves an emotional impact and does justice to the role that slavery played at UVa. The Guide Service was able to partner with MEL to raise both funding and awareness for the project using the Colonnade Ball which ended up being an absolute blast– we’ll be partnering up again next year!

What first sparked your interest in UVA’s history?

There’s a quote from the University’s first president, Edwin Alderman, that goes ““You cannot speak of Mr. Jefferson around Charlottesville without feeling that he is about to turn the nearest corner. It is a pungent form of immortality that now and then gives you a turn.” I think he had a valid point. We talk about Jefferson like he’s still her today, I think that that had a big impact on me when I was looking at schools and I decided to really delve into it when I got here, I wanted to figure out what all the buzz was about.

What else are you involved in around grounds?

This past semester I was FINALLY able to adopt-a-grandparent through Madison House, something I’ve been wanting to do since I first got to UVa. While it took a while to set up, my adopted grandmother Carol was well-worth the wait. She’s the light of my life. I’ve also served two years on Class Council’s Entertainment committee, I intern with Hillel, and I make sandwiches at Take-it-Away. It’s been like a year and they still won’t give me the recipe to the House Dressing.

What’s your favorite UVA tradition? 

As cliche as it sounds, I’m going to have to go with streaking the lawn. At 36.5 I’m a little behind on the number I need to be at to reach 100 streaks before I graduate but I think I’ll manage to pull it off. The time that only counted as .5, well,  the reality is that on that occasion I never made it back to the Rotunda. A few friends and I had gone out first semester, first year, and we’d decided to streak the lawn on our way back to dorms. Apparently I ran right past Homer and showed up in front of Hancock four hours later with the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg written in sharpie alllllll the way down my body.