Meredith Warden ’23

We complain a lot, but it's all in good fun.

I never intended to play field hockey in college.

My senior year so far has been paradoxical.

Reflections on my last few weeks in Edinburgh.

For my spring break abroad in Edinburgh, I visited some Oberlin friends currently studying in Spain.

The first time I visited Oberlin, I hated it.

This past week, I traveled outside of my study abroad home city—Edinburgh, Scotland—to go to London for three days!

In many ways studying abroad in a new place is like starting college all over again.

While, of course, depending on your major and interests, you could read wildly different books than what I’ve included here, I still hope this list is interesting and gives you a snapshot into what one Oberlin student reads over the course of a semester!

The best thing about Oberlin, I think, is that the communities you find for yourself here are, in many ways, up to you.

While having a busy schedule is sometimes overwhelming, self-reflection and making sure that I still want to commit to the things I’m doing help me manage and enjoy my time here.

I think I’ve always been a somewhat introspective person who notices the ‘little things in life.’

I still feel connected to Oberlin’s community even when I’m hundreds of miles away.

Ever since I learned about the Writing Center at Oberlin, I knew that I wanted to work as a writing associate.

As I prepared to go back to Oberlin for this fall semester, I was unsure about what practicing sports would look like in the middle of a pandemic.

You can still gain work experience as a young college student even with the pandemic and an uncertain future.

My StudiOC posts are, in themselves, a way to represent life during coronavirus, to try to understand specific aspects of this pandemic within a broader context and take note of my own responses.

Who wouldn’t want to hang a Picasso in their dorm room?

Why do history museums exist? What power do they hold as cultural institutions and ‘gatekeepers’ of the past?

Now that my first semester in college has officially ended, I can safely say that I’ve read a lot these past four months.

I see office hours as just another way people at Oberlin demonstrate how invested they are in every single student’s education.

The atmosphere of a school is more than just academics—it is made up of those tiny, everyday interactions and observations that define one’s relation to a place.