I came to Vassar with the singular expectation that there would be a space for me to fill. It was to be a social space, an intellectual space, an artistic space. I was going to fall into it when I was ready. I imagined this process of suffusion involving minor adversity here, conversations about topics that defied the bounds of my knowledge there and the occasional irreparably awkward moment. At the end of each day, though, everything would be fine because I was somehow in a place that someone had deemed the right one for me. It took time for me to let go of this vaguely conceived idea of what my Vassar experience was to be. I cannot say when my instinct to passively receive knowledge transformed into an instinct to actively seek it, but that my experience at Vassar catalyzed this shift I have no doubt.
There is a generosity about this campus that lends itself to students who are attempting to forge an artistic identity. In its verdant landscape, open spaces and hidden corners of Gothic antiquity, this is a campus that invites creation through inhabitation. I learned how to recognize negative and positive spaces in Basic Drawing and Design on this campus. Novice that I was and still am, I am ever thankful that my eye sees artistic possibility everywhere. This way of seeing is a choice that I learned to make alongside the fellow theater makers of my class and the classes before me. The experience of observing and working with people who are bold in their love for art has changed my life. Never have I been part of a wide network of individuals so consistently curious and tenacious in their craft. Out of the personal and communal experiences of watching each other perform onstage and performing ourselves, an assertive and keenly sensitive group of artists has emerged. I now know what an artistic voice sounds and feels like. The work of my friends and peers has cracked me open, filled me with joy and pride, left me raw and made me yearn for more. I no longer float through life with the hope that artistic inspiration will fall in my lap-that my day’s travels will carry me to the same safe place each night. I have chosen to look for art everywhere, and I see it.
I think of poet Sylvia Plath’s lines, “You are the one / solid the spaces lean on, envious,” from her poem “Nick and the Candlestick,” and I cannot help but feel that I have become a space that surrounds the ever-present devotion to theater on this campus. I am glad that I will leave Vassar a more porous being than I was when I entered. The plays that I have watched and been in at Vassar, as well as the work that I did on my senior thesis have bored holes in the carefully constructed identity that I brought with me to Vassar. In my four years with Woodshed Theater Ensemble and my one semester thesis project spent with Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus, I have learned to say yes. Vassar has been a place of both extreme pain and immense bliss. I attribute my ability to affirm the duality of my experience through my art to the students and professors that I have come to know at this school. My gratitude will find expression in the art that I create.
by Hannah Erdheim, Class of 2010, and Allison Smith, Class of 2010.
To meet us now, you’d never guess that we have only known each other for two years. We are the two graduating seniors from Iced Brew, Vassar’s synchronized skating team, and being on the team has brought us really close together. The team has been a large part of our college experience.
Hannah: Recently I realized that I made good on a promise. On the supplement to my Vassar application, I responded to the question “what will you contribute to the Vassar community?” with a lengthy explanation about my ambition to start a synchronized skating team at Vassar. I skated on a team for nine years prior to coming to Vassar and hoped to continue to skate in college. Even though there are many other schools around the country with established teams, I was drawn to Vassar for its academics and atypical student body over my desire to skate. Therefore, I decided to try and have the best of both worlds and start a team at Vassar. When I arrived on campus freshman year and met my fellow classmates, it seemed like this would be a quirky enough thing that students would be interested in it. Thus, in my sophomore year, Iced Brew was born. It’s been a challenging, yet incredibly rewarding three years. I may have had to build everything up from scratch, including many of the members who had never skated before, but I’ve loved every minute of it. To me, being the founder and president of Iced Brew is the greatest accomplishment of my college career.
Allison: The last thing that I expected to do in college was join a synchronized skating team. I was a singles skater for many years, but quit long before coming to Vassar. Instead, I did a little tutoring at Poughkeepsie Middle School and joined the student committee at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. In fact, when I first saw the posters recruiting members for Iced Brew, I didn’t even consider joining. My hallmates spent an entire year encouraging me to sign up, and during the fall of junior year I finally joined the team. Not only did joining Iced Brew bring me back into a rink, it has also led me to experience more aspects of life at Vassar than I knew possible. The members of the team have majors in every subject, and participate in a variety of other activities on campus. This year Hannah and I live together in the South Commons, and we spend tons of time figuring out how to keep the team fun and focused. This season I became captain of the team, and have enjoyed my position as co-troubleshooter and team cheerleader. This experience has brought me close to students of all years, backgrounds and interests, as well as rekindled my passion for skating.
Hannah & Allison: Together we have won gold medals at two local competitions, performed exhibitions for our peers, and baked tons and tons of cookies for fundraising bake sales. The team has grown tremendously (from six to 24 skaters in three years), and we’re both really proud of our role in Iced Brew’s development. We’re completely student-run, and as a result, we’ve had a lot of freedom, but also a lot of responsibility. Iced Brew will be our legacy at Vassar and will provide students in future classes an opportunity to be a part of this unique community. Iced Brew has enriched our college experiences greatly and we hope it will do the same for others for years to come.
I remember two things from the Fall Convocation of our freshman year, in September 2006. I remember the Vassar Student Association president telling our class to relish every moment of our four years at Vassar because before we knew it, one of us would be up there addressing the Class of 2013. That blew my mind-2013. It seemed light years away. The second thing I remember is President Hill, in one of her first speeches as the new president of Vassar College, advising us to try new things-to take a course in a subject we found intimidating, to take up a new activity, to learn a new language. When I started college, I had no idea what I wanted to major in. I only knew that I had wanted to study the Italian language since I was about eight years old, and I was finally going to be able to do that.
Other than my desire to take Italian, I had no academic plan. I dabbled in English and drama my first semester, then decided I wanted to branch out and try subjects I knew nothing about-cognitive science, media studies, religion, linguistics, astronomy and art history. To be quite honest, at the end of freshman year, I felt confused and aimless. I was enjoying my random melange of classes, but I was still clueless about what to major in, and I envied my friends who seemed to have everything figured out. I decided to keep taking Italian, which I adored as much as I thought I would, but worried about what I could possibly do with my life if I majored in Italian.
Although I felt like I was floundering at times, in the past four years I’ve taken classes in 14 academic departments. I eventually did decide to major in Italian, with a minor in art history. But some of my favorite classes have been those I added on a whim during the first week of the semester in departments I never considered when I sat in the Vassar Chapel in the fall of freshman year. I’ve written a research paper about women’s baseball during World War II and observed three-year-olds’ speech patterns at the on-campus nursery school. I mastered the Martha Graham-style dance contraction and spent an entire semester analyzing costumes, hairstyles, and sets of Hollywood movies from the ’20s and ’30s. I couldn’t possibly have seen it then, way back in freshman year, but the greatest gift Vassar has given me has been the freedom to create my own education-to force myself to push past confusion and explore new fields.
No, I still can’t tell you what I’ll do with my degree in Italian, but thanks for asking. I can, however, have a conversation in what is quite possibly the world’s most beautiful language. I can explain why Italians never drink cappuccino after 10 a.m. and why they never use Parmesan cheese on a seafood pasta dish. I can serenade you with 136 memorized lines from Dante’s “Inferno” or transport you to Manhattan’s Lower East Side with an excerpt from my historical fiction thesis inspired by my Sicilian family’s immigrant past. Somehow, out of semesters of confusion and a hodgepodge of classes, I gained some clarity. I accepted the fact that my undergraduate major doesn’t need to determine the course of my entire life, and I delved into a whole array of disciplines. Somewhere along the line, I let go of the idea that I had to have a plan, and just enjoyed the ride.
Sometimes things do fall into place. In the words of Dante Alighieri, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” – and thence we came forth to look again at the stars.
Chocolate syrup. Somehow these two words have found themselves wedged into almost every aspect of my time here at Vassar. Chocolate syrup reminds me of the first time I e-mailed my freshman year roommate, who loves chocolate syrup. I hate chocolate syrup, and this is just one example of the many ways in which we are total opposites but soul mates all the same. My time at Vassar never would have been the same without her.
Chocolate syrup reminds me ever so lovingly of the hours I spent “frying like bacon,” singing as loudly as I could, and getting syrup, amongst many other condiments thrown at me by seniors whom I revered as gods at the time. The bonds that come from dancing and singing with a group of 18-year-olds who have never lived on their own cannot easily be broken. Still today I pass my fellow Lathropians and give a nod or a smile, recognizing that only a select group of us could really know what it’s like to hold your “L’s up” for about eight hours on a 90-degree day in September, scared to death but smiling and laughing all the same. Chocolate syrup is what we allegedly washed off in the Main House bathrooms after serenading freshman year, after getting a heart breaking second place when really, we deserved first.
Chocolate syrup reminds me of every dinner I ate at All Campus Dining Center during my freshmen and sophomore years with the same core group of people with whom I still eat almost every meal. It reminds me of the fact that I probably ate things that involved chocolate syrup, again, which I hate, out of pure desperation and the desire for that feeling of full you get when you eat something you actually enjoyed.
Chocolate syrup reminds me of going abroad for three and half months. Living in a foreign country made me miss things I knew I hated, but that still reminded me of home. Chocolate syrup, McDonald’s, coffee, refrigerated eggs and chicken fingers-all things you never cared about or noticed until you’re eating pieces of ham, lukewarm hard boiled eggs and Nescafe for breakfast every morning at random hotels throughout the Mediterranean.
The stickiness of chocolate syrup reminds me of the various degrees of disgust I found myself feeling while surveying my living room second semester junior year on almost every Sunday morning, being responsible for keeping my house clean for the very first time, and questioning exactly how at the party the night before someone had managed to get that all the way up there.
Chocolate syrup was a key ingredient in my “water” gun first semester senior year when I finally got to be the cool kid and cheered on the Lathrop freshmen while also soaking them with the “water” in my gun, jug and carafe that I grabbed after finally deciding that a “water only” serenading could in fact be fun and filled with more than water.
Chocolate syrup reminds me of the initial awkwardness and then the following understanding that comes from five girls with very different taste having to figure out how to divide the fridge, buy groceries together and separately and combine our efforts to create a clean, functional kitchen.
In all, chocolate syrup has been a surprisingly large part of my time at Vassar. But so have a lot of other things. I can’t imagine life without my freshmen year roommate, who never fails to drive me crazy. She will go on to do bigger things than she could ever realize, and watching that process takes my breath away. My friends from Lathrop, whom I’ve been lucky enough to keep since freshman year, have been my support system through everything I’ve done and gone through at Vassar. They have touched my life in ways I will never remember, and in ways I’m scared to hope for again. The boys next door have made me laugh, cry and learn how to fight back. The unexpected connection I have with them is something I will keep close to my heart for a long time. All these people and events, along with chocolate syrup, have shaped my time here at Vassar and have made it into this intangible feeling that I am grasping onto for dear life. I’m ready to move on, but hopefully I’ll have a little chocolate syrup in my future to bring me back to a place where I can honestly say I became who I want to be, to a place I will never forget.
“What will you miss most about Vassar?” a friend’s father recently asked. I took a moment. The campus, the academics, the activities? I went with my friends; “Living in such a high concentration of 20- to 22-year-olds,” I responded. “I’ll never again be surrounded by so many incredible people my age. All my closest friends live with a 15 minute radius.” To me, Vassar is about making meaningful connections: relationships between people, parallels between classes, and analogies between academics and life-experiences. From frustrating days in the library freshman year to quirky evenings in senior housing, the past four years were absolutely extraordinary.
I started classes freshman year by making a pact with myself: that academics would always come first. I spent most days in the Library, but luckily had incredible friends in Cushing House to return to each evening. While I’ve stood by my academic goals, I eventually realized that the relationships made here are just as significant.
I joined The Miscellany News sophomore year and immediately developed great relationships with my colleagues whilst working through the grueling weekly production schedule. Being on the paper spurred an active engagement with the College’s inner workings. Learning about Vassar’s history, understanding the administration and tracking current arts events fostered a deep respect for the institution.
After a diverting junior semester abroad in London, I wasn’t ready to return to the rigid Vassar schedule and the tiny campus. Moving in to the new Town Houses, however, refreshed the school for me. I lived with ten girls who transformed from mere acquaintances to close friends by the semesters’ end. I met professors that challenged me and took courses that reformulated my interests. This continued into senior year, which has outdone the rest in terms of meaningful friendships and social excitement. I wrote two theses and took on new opportunities with a WVKR radio show. I fully immersed myself in Vassar’s peculiar social traditions, and I explored the beautiful campus. Even after walking the same paths thousands of times, I still gaped at the huge trees and magnificent buildings. Leaving this idyllic environment will definitely come as a shock.
I haven’t yet come to terms with leaving the place that has been my home for the past four years, but maybe I don’t have to. While my time on this campus will conclude on May 23, and the concentration of smart minds and affectionate hearts will disperse, I know that Vassar will stay with me. This somehow makes graduation and the thought of starting another chapter of my life a little less terrifying. Absorbing Vassar’s culture and ethos is inevitable. It will remain inside of me through all that I have learnt; it will remain around me through my continued friendships.
For the rest of my life, these past four years will persistently shape my character and thoughts. I want to say thank you to all my professors, friends and classmates. Thank you for building this unforgettable experience.
