At my first job after graduation, I met and mingled with students who had graduated from ‘normal’ colleges and universities. One of the girls that I worked with told me that I was different in a condescending tone, and I immediately thought, ‘Yes, I am.’
I was, not surprisingly, a person who disliked Sarah Lawrence my first year, because of feelings of isolation and lack of direction. It seemed as if everyone had it all figured out; everyone had their group: the dancers who used every spare moment to create motion, the theatre kids who had limited spare time. Then, there was me. I had thought that I had wanted to dance, I had done theatre in high school, and I was simply confused. I wish I would have let myself dream a little more. Just because I hadn’t been a swimmer for ten years shouldn’t have meant that I couldn’t join the Gryphons in the pool at the ripe old age of 18, 19, or 20.
It took two years at Sarah Lawrence and a year abroad for me to realize why I loved the college and how it had changed me. Being abroad, I had met other people my age from universities around the country, and saw what I had that they lacked. I was always the first person to raise my hand in class, begin an argument with a student or professor, or ask questions. I was more independent and had difficulty with rote learning activities in which I remembered nothing. Sarah Lawrence had changed me in my core without me even realizing it.
So, now as I look back, I realize that during my first year I absorbed the Sarah Lawrence philosophy in a way that will never leave me. I will always value creativity and the fomentation of conversation, because life is a series of challenging moments. Life is not reading a book passively, but rather, discussing a book. In a nutshell, my first year at Sarah Lawrence was difficult, like everybody’s. The more I tried, the more I received. The more I invested in my conference work, the more I learned. The more I tried to make friends, the more friends I had. Basically, Sarah Lawrence is not for the weak of heart, a lesson which every first-year has to learn on their own.