Senior Retrospective | Emma Carmichael

I called home a lot during my first week of classes at Vassar. I could not believe the workload. On the second day of my Introduction to Sociology class, the professor assigned a book and a five to seven page paper on that book, due the following Tuesday. It was Thursday. I couldn't believe it. On Monday night I called home and talked to my dad and, panicked, told him I wasn't prepared for this college. I was going to fail my first assignment. I was already overwhelmed, and I wanted to go home.

I wrote that paper, though. I think it was on C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination. If I remember correctly, that book was dense. I sprawled on my bed on the fourth floor of Josselyn on Sunday night, making my first real attempt at "annotating"—which at that point mostly consisted of a lot of question marks and notes like "come back to this????" And then on Monday night I sat, at the last chair in the long table on the first floor right-hand side, typing at my computer until the bells chimed at 1, and then 1:25, in the morning. When I handed in my essay the next day, I felt so triumphant, so ready. Maybe I could figure this out after all.

I'm grateful to Vassar and to my professors for giving me the time I needed to figure it all out. I came to Poughkeepsie from a small town in southern Vermont, and at first Vassar just felt like too much to me. I could study things that interested me (like hip-hop—in college!), do things without asking anyone's permission (like climbing the scaffolding on Main Building to the roof at 3 a.m.! That was dumb.); yeah, I could generally fuck around and get away with it. Over the years that freedom has felt alternately delightful and terrifying. The delight, of course, is easily targeted: we're in a beautiful place, surrounded by people we have grown to love, learning as much as we can, and after a while here it has come to feel a lot like home.

The terror is more difficult to place, but I think it has to do with an excess of comfort. When everything is going fairly smoothly, when your biggest concern is writing an essay or getting through a tragically boring sociology book, I think it all starts to feel too static. And at a certain age and maturity, stability—or perhaps more accurately, boredom—can be horrifying. I really miss that shock I felt in my first few weeks at Vassar and into the spring of my freshman year, when every idea I encountered was not just new, but also challenging and confusing for me. Once I settled into the routine here, and realized I was capable of keeping up with the college workload, maybe I got too comfortable. I do know that I called home a lot less.

The thing is, though—discomfort isn't always assigned. It's a lot more than struggling through a 300-page book and an essay. It's hard to point out moments of growth or change over the course of four years, but I know that mine came when things got harder for me. I remember a class midway through Assistant Professor of English Kiese Laymon's James Baldwin course in spring of my sophomore year, when half of the students were in tears by the end of the session because our conversations about Baldwin's work and our own lives had become so emotional and difficult to talk through. I remember the first time I really got away from campus, when I went to work at a community center in the spring of my freshman year, and realized that the theory I'd been consuming so rapidly didn't always apply to real life. I remember reporting for the Miscellany earlier this year, holding my voice recorder out in a crowded hallway in Rockefeller Hall as a former staff member confronted President Hill about job cuts. In those moments, Vassar got hard again, and I felt pretty helpless.

In four years here I've learned to write papers under stress and to read books in under two or three days and to meet deadlines (or at least master the art of extending them), but I'm still a pretty clueless, naïve young kid. I am still quite unprepared and overwhelmed by it all—especially the murky expanse of time that lies ahead after May 23—and I think that's something to embrace. I hope Vassar students will do the same: wiggle your way out of that static consistency, if you ever feel it, and do something that makes you feel like you want to call home. It's nice to feel grown up, but we are still kids, after all.

—Emma Carmichael is the outgoing president of Hip-Hop 101, served as the Town Students Representative to the VSA in Spring 2009 and served as the Features Editor of The Miscellany News in the fall 2009.