Senior Retrospective | Caitlin Halasz

My senior year of high school, when I came out to the East Coast from northern California to visit the colleges that had accepted me, I didn't even visit Vassar. I had been accepted to what I thought was the school of my dreams, Barnard College; after visiting there and a few schools in Pennsylvania, I had a choice of whether to spend a day in New York City, or drive up to visit Vassar. By that point, I had pretty much decided on Barnard, so I decided to skip the drive upstate and spend the day in the city.

It would very much surprise the 18-year-old me, then, to learn that I am now, at the age of 22, preparing to graduate from Vassar, after transferring here from Barnard at the beginning of my sophomore year. As a place to spend three years, Vassar was certainly not without its problems—I don't think anywhere is—but it ended up being a great place to go to college; I have loved spending my late nights below the stained glass windows and vaulted ceilings of the Library, walking across the leaf-covered quad in the fall, and studying on weekday afternoons in the bizarre (but bizarrely comfortable) modern armchairs in Noyes House's Jetson Lounge.

As a classics major, I've gotten a chance to take classes over and over with the same great professors in Vassar's small Classics Department, which has been one of the best parts of my time here. When I arrived at Vassar, I knew I would major in classics; I had already discovered that I loved learning the grammar and literature of Latin and Ancient Greek. When anyone asked me the eternal liberal-arts-student question, though—"What are you going to do with a classics major?"—my answer would be a shrug and an "ehh, maybe I'll be a classics professor..." This was my answer, at the time, because it was it was one of the few ways I could answer that question without the asker—often a complete stranger—telling me that it might be more profitable to major in economics. Now, though, I'm going on next year to a doctorate program in classics, not because it's the only option available, or even the most obvious option available, but because I have learned, through my classes at Vassar, that I want to keep studying ancient Greece and Rome for years to come.

Next year, when I'm in graduate school in Los Angeles, I will spend my time surrounded with people who are also passionate about studying the ancient world. What I have loved about Vassar, though, was being surrounded by people who were just as passionate as me, but about completely different things. Whether it's feminism, or photography, or even—occasionally—sports, the people I have spent my time with at Vassar have been dedicated to a wide range of passions and pursuits. As a member of the Editorial Board of The Miscellany News, I was surrounded by people who knew every official in Vassar's administration and the inner workings of the student government, and who spent their time investigating and writing in-depth articles making the changes our College was undergoing accessible and interesting to the Vassar community. My own contributions to the Miscellany, as copy editor last year and senior and contributing editor this year, consisted mainly of making sure that the paper never used an Oxford comma and cutting 900-word articles down to 700 words at 2 a.m. on Tuesday nights, so that everything would fit into our layout when we sent the paper to the publisher. I am proud, though, that I was part of the paper in the last three years, playing a role, however small, in recording a few important and tumultuous years in Vassar's history, as the College responded to the 2008 financial crisis.

It's hard, really, to sum up my entire Vassar experience in a retrospective of this length. Vassar, for me, has been far more than just my academics and the Miscellany. It has been, just as much, late nights sitting around and not doing homework with my housemates in the living room of SoCo 6 or with my neighbors in the hallways of Noyes; it has been terrible meals in the All Campus Dining Center and delicious meals in my SoCo kitchen; it has been Sunday afternoons from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. knitting in Raymond Parlor with Knights of Commuknitty, the knitting group of which I was a member and sometimes-president. Beyond these moments and experiences, though, three years of college is hard to define in so many words. This, probably, is the way it should be—indefinable experiences are simply more interesting. I can only hope, then, that as I move back to California and enter graduate school and the "real world," that there will be more equally good—and equally indefinable—experiences to come.

—Caitlin Halasz is an outgoing Contributing Editor of The Miscellany News, and the former president of the Knights of Commuknitty.