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Before starting grad school, people often told me this would be a difficult phase of my life in many ways. I didn’t know at that point what they were talking about. But when I moved to the U.S. six months back, the main thing that hit me was loneliness.
The night before the first day of classes, my roommate asked me if I would be able to find my way around campus. The next day came, and once I arrived, I immediately realized that I had absolutely no idea where I was going.
When my grandmother passed away last fall, I thought my world had ended. Honestly, I still do. She shared the fate of many unfortunate people during this pandemic. She died alone. She was in a nursing home and luckily, she had a window, so we could see her and wave for a bit, but it’s not the same.
Just like every other person, I have several substantial aspects to my personality that I make sure to mention on a daily basis. For example, every person on my floor is now very much aware that the state of Michigan obtained the Upper Peninsula after the Battle of Toledo.
Few things about sixth grade stand out as particularly memorable to me, but I do remember something my band director used to say to me when I meandered into his room complaining that I couldn’t wait for the day, the week, the year to end. He’d always say, “Don’t go wishing your life away.”
When I was in elementary school, I was always known as the girl with glasses. Due to an unfortunate mix of poor genetics and playing Wii and Nintendo DS during my childhood, I was forced to don wired spectacles by six years old.
One of my friends keeps joking that Hopkins has three classes of freshmen this year. And while I don’t want to make light of the serious loss we’ve all suffered in our education (and other areas of life), he’s not exactly wrong.
I walked along N. Charles Street this morning, Taylor Swift’s album Red playing in my ears and the crisp, 63-degree air necessitating a cardigan to keep me from shivering. The feeling of the cool air, complemented by the warmth of the sun’s rays, made me feel excited to see the turning of the seasons, the likes of which I had never seen.
As the end of August drew near, I began to spot more and more cars filled with boxes and suitcases parked outside the AMRs and CharMar. After a semester and a summer of online everything — whether it be a class, movie watch party or an internship — seeing people walking around on campus was surreal.
You can’t go to Hopkins without hearing about impostor syndrome. As soon as I accepted my admissions offer from the University, it was like a specter waving at me from the semester to come. The phrase continuously popped up in Reddit threads and prospective student group chats. Upperclassmen warned me that I would sometimes (or often) feel inferior to my classmates, doubt my intelligence and wonder how I ever got accepted in the first place.
For most people, the COVID-19 pandemic constituted an upheaval of regular social order and a reworking of existing patterns and habits. While this manifested in my life in many ways, it was especially distinct in its effect on my relationships, considering the important transitionary period I was entering during the pandemic.
My mother’s dream since childhood was to have a horse. She was not around horses as a kid, other than in books, and only began riding in her 20s. In her 40s, she began volunteering at a horse rescue.
Whenever I think of the first day of school, I think of a specific photo of myself standing outside of my grandparents’ apartment in Rio. I’m 3 years old, wearing a school uniform, holding a clear backpack and grinning from cheek to cheek.
I recently passed the Rec Center and noticed the blown-up photograph of students on treadmills. I suddenly came to the realization that, in my four years at Hopkins, I have never set foot in the exercise room there. (My trips to the Rec Center have always been for the squash courts — please don’t judge me and my athletic inclinations.)
If you blink, you’ll miss it. Just like that, four years are coming to a close. Four magical, frustrating, incomparable years full of love, learning and growth.
After a longer-than-expected hiatus from the Gatehouse (The News-Letter’s office), I’ve somehow found myself back here again to write my last column. It feels fitting. There is something comforting about being back in the space where I spent so much of the last four years. In fact, there were many weeks where I spent more time here than I did in my own apartment. It feels good to be back, though more than a little bittersweet.
I love a good sense of symbolic closure.
In April 2020, sitting at computers almost 3,000 miles apart, we were elected to be Editors-in-Chief of The News-Letter. By then, we’d been doing remote production for about a month, but at the time, we believed that things would soon return to normal.
Last weekend, one of my friends helped me take graduation photos around Decker Quad. It was unusually cold and windy. We posed in front of the lecture halls and admin buildings that framed the well-tended lawn, forcing smiles against cool gusts of spring air that whipped across the quad.
So this is it — the last week of college. And yes, my last article. Goodbye, Perls of Wisdom. It’s been fun. I’ve taken the trip down memory lane a few times this semester. I’m more sentimental than I expected.
