At the end of my senior year, and thus at the end of my time as a student at Carleton, I cannot help but feel as though I have inexplicably missed out on something. I cannot place what this mysterious “something” is, but I know deep down that I’ve missed it. This “missing out” is objectively true in a sense — to attend every event at Carleton would mean getting absolutely no work done and, if one thing has remained consistent about Carleton over the past four years, it’s that Carleton students really want to do their work (and I myself am no exception). There is a “missing out” more tangible than that, though — I feel it whenever I get an email asking me to audition for something happening next year, or when I walk into my favorite buildings to see classes posted for a Fall Term that I won’t be around for.
They tell us, and we repeat, that Carleton is a small place with a small student body. It feels the opposite upon the realization that this place has been here for over a century and change, and that it’ll probably be here when you’re gone, too. In the stream of time, what is an individual student to an institution that has housed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of students over its lifetime? What are you?
It’s a story I’ve repeated so often as to become muscle memory, but when I was a freshman oh-so-long ago, I arrived fresh off the plane with an inherent skepticism about the idea of a liberal arts education and the idea of anything but a practical approach to education as a pipeline to a stable career. I was adjusting well socially when I was thrown an unexpected curveball by my new student week leader (and later dear friend) in the form of an invitation to a Social Dance Club. Now, I have two left feet and actual flat feet, but I just couldn’t find it in me to say no, and so I went and there I stayed at varying levels of commitment for the past four years. It’s where I met my best friends (and a future roommate!), where I found love and where I fell in love with this thing that I didn’t even know I was capable of doing. In my participation in Ballroom Dance at Carleton, there was the learning of the skill and the moves and the styles. But more than that, it was the first time that I started to see things beyond a strict utilitarian calculus, and I began to appreciate things for everything else that they bring that cannot be penned down to numbers or applications sent out. There could maybe be more to life, after all.
Much is made of the “community” at Carleton, with endless efforts and meetings and conferences and emails about New Student Week and Peer Leader Conferences and on and on and on, but the real community is always outside the official. It is the community of students getting together to do something cool in their scant off-time for nothing more than being together and doing some things along the way. The accumulation of these gestures resonates temporally through Carleton history to the present, traditions that would be banned if they started today are grandfathered in because students stuck together in odd ways to the point where they became fixed gathering points for everyone regardless of marketability or optics. One student is one student, zeitgeists change, but a community continues on far past its original formation. It’s easy to forget that.
Art has been a large part of my time here as well. I came into Carleton knowing that I wanted to do Art and Computer Science, but I would always tell everyone and myself that it was Computer Science that would be my priority. I did my internships and externships and coding interviews like a good student, but I could never really keep myself away from Boliou for very long. I poked my head into studios that I had no academic reason to be in, I’d pick at the brains of the upperclassmen and “appropriate” materials here and there for some extracurricular art-related experiments. As the eternal skeptic, I wasn’t convinced that art had much power beyond the aesthetic and fleeting “oh yeah that looked pretty cool” that seemed to be most of everyone else’s (myself included) engagement with the vast majority of art. But then my work was vandalized by someone who did it specifically because the image of my foreign passport evoked some sort of misplaced nationalistic rage within them. After a sweet $500 payment for my troubles by said vandal, a part of that series was selected for show at a gallery in Minneapolis. If a couple of posters was enough to inspire someone into uncontrollable childishness and anger, surely it could do more than just that. A part of my interest in it stems from the same academic curiosity I was once so skeptical of. How can you take the history of humanity’s visual creation, abstract academic theories and your own personhood and make something that nobody else could? The facts of the natural world seem as though they would always eventually be found by someone, but if the individual artist did not exist, their works would never come to be. Maybe that’s worth something.
Another, perhaps more selfish, part of this is a will to be remembered past my time. International students like myself have always occupied a tenuous position in undergraduate institutions, and to love a place like Carleton so fleetingly is to try your best to make something and leave it behind for others to see. I have a broken sculpture behind Boliou, a couple stickers here and there and maybe these articles to attest to my existence on campus. I passed on my leadership roles in the Carletonian, Social Dance Club, Synchrony II and CSA to people I hope do a better job than I could. In four short years, all the students I knew here will have graduated and maybe some of the faculty will move on too.
Very little remains against the sheer weight of the institution, but everything stays with those that were there. What I lose in place, I know I will triple in what I carry with me from here. The love I was so generously given, the times spent in life-altering conversations, the kindness I never felt like I deserved are now forever a part of the person I take with me out of this campus. In these last few weeks, I find myself overwhelmed at how it comes together at this end. Final cries, final events, final exams and final performances come like a remix of every emotion I’ve felt over my time here intensified to an unbearable lightness. “There’s no place like Carleton”…that’s not really true. “There’s no people like Carleton” feels right. The wind turbines and soft peals of laughter, this is somewhere to be, at least for a while. Be vigilant; I love you.
