On August 25th, 2022, I stepped on Oberlin’s campus as a first-year student. This past Friday, I attended my last class as an undergraduate student in college. Unsurprisingly, I have been reflecting on my time here a lot, thinking about everything that has defined my time as an Obie. More so, I’ve been thinking about whether my four years in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Ohio have been worth it. I have the easiest answer ever, and in my final blog as a student, I want to tell you why it’s a yes.
Classes
Classes at Oberlin are small – an average of 20-30 students per class, creating the perfect balance between diverse opinions and contributions and an intimate learning environment. More than that, they’ve been conducive to the relationships I’ve built with professors, both in and out of the classroom. Although I’ve written many essays, presented a lot of different projects, and submitted a lot of creative pieces, I measure my academic success by the mark my professors have left on me and the mark I have in turn (hopefully) left on others. As I was leaving each classroom on the final days of classes last week, I couldn’t help but think about how one of the main things I’d miss would be these relationships – because they weren’t just my professors and mentors; the faculty I’ve interacted with at Oberlin have become my role models.
Work
I cannot imagine an Oberlin experience without the on-campus employment that accompanied it. My work at the Cat in the Cream, mentioned in many of my other blogs, has been a staple to my time here. It has not only given me a job, but a second home, a community, precious friendships, and the opportunity to get paid while listening to live jazz music. Just this past week, the staff farewell hit such sentimentality that it wasn’t surprising that we all cried. My position as a Teaching Assistant in multiple Spanish classes, along with my Writing Associate role and Spanish In The Elementary Schools (SITES) Instructor, have taught me so much more than just tutoring: I learned how to navigate professional relationships with professors and mentors, how to navigate being a peer tutor to students I shared classes with, and how to build a level of comfort for learning to become possible. My involvement in the Admissions office, both as an ambassador and tour guide, as well as a blogger, have given me the opportunity to interact with the prospective Obies – the confident, the shy, the quiet, the sassy – and I’ve been able to recognize myself in every single one of them. The day I arrived on campus, I couldn't have imagined the experience I ended up having, and much of it is due to the mentors and people that worked by my side day by day – from jazz forums to lunches with prospective students.
Community
And if there is anything I will miss the most, it will be the people. I was lucky to find my friends so early on in my time at Oberlin that they became my sense of belonging before Oberlin as a location and as a college did. When I went to study abroad, an experience I reflected on in another blog, I realized how special Obieland had become, and how it happened to be so because of the people.
I will miss walking into Mudd and seeing the congregations around the first floor tables. I will miss seeing a swarm of people out on Wilder Bowl and North Quad whenever the sun comes out. I will miss walking across the tables in Stevie to say hi to people, and I will definitely miss the huge freshman groups of 15 people that sit down for meals together. I was once a part of freshmen groups that big too! I will miss the music events, and I will always treasure the end-of-year celebrations, from research presentations to art walks and student awards shows.
And I will really, really, really miss sunny Oberlin and Ohio.
End of an area: a farewell to Oberlin, a farewell to the US
I arrived in the US for the first time seven years ago, enrolling in a US high school and continuing my education at Oberlin. Recently, I was talking about how sentimental it felt to be leaving a college and country that has been a home for such a long time, when a friend suddenly said:
“You know how the average lifespan of a cell in your body is 7-10 years? Of course it’s sentimental to leave; we’re literally new people!”
Between every shift, class, and picnic, I was slowly becoming a new person, leaving Oberlin as a different Maja than the one that arrived. Is there anything more worth it than that?
