As the semester comes to a close, I find myself in a nostalgic, uncharacteristic mood. Four years ago, I was just trying to survive my first finals week as a stressed-out, overwhelmed freshman. It sounds cliché, but I have no idea how time has moved so quickly, and now I’m concluding my last ever fall semester as an undergraduate. My best friend and I met for lunch today and we couldn’t believe how much we have grown since we met on move-in day at Redding. It feels like a lifetime ago, yet it also feels like yesterday. I have a feeling a lot of clichés will be thrown out in this post, but I can’t help it.
I came into college declared as an English major, not knowing much beyond my passion for reading and writing. Despite some looming doubts and outside voices, I trusted I would figure out my path eventually. Over the past years, I took literature classes that excited me, creative writing classes that bettered me, and English classes that just sounded fun. I became a member of the Writing Fellows Program, a writer (and now editor) for this blog, and an editor of Caesura, the campus literary magazine. I also added history as a second major and worked extremely hard to balance two of the most writing-centric subjects offered at the university. Sometimes it was a lot, but I made it out alive. I successfully increased my passions through my education and will leave UD this upcoming spring as a better student and a better person.
This fall, I had one English class left to satisfy my degree. My honors senior capstone experience was ENGL480, a course that worked with UD’s Special Collections to analyze the Langston Hughes Ephemera Collection. While the class pushed me outside of my comfort zone, forcing me to interact with material objects and eventually curate a pop-up exhibit, the experience taught me valuable skills about writing for a digital platform and a museum catalog. On Wednesday, December 5, our class got to present our work in the Scholar in the Library series in Morris. Standing up in front of so many faculty members was definitely intimidating, but I felt proud to showcase our semester-long projects. It didn’t sink in until the next day that my time in the English department at UD is over. Next semester I will be taking electives and finishing my history degree. As the girl that chose her major simply because she loved it, I can truly say that I now love reading and writing ten times more than I ever did, and I look forward to finishing my debut novel after graduation.
