According to the admissions office, eighty percent of Oberlin students will study abroad at some point during their four years here. My guess would be that eighty percent of that eighty percent are people who spend a semester abroad in the spring of their third year. Or that’s what it feels like at least! This semester, I have friends studying abroad in Germany, England, Chile, Guatemala, South Africa, Costa Rica, and Thailand, just to name a few. So, as someone in the twenty percent, I thought I would take some time to enumerate the new things I’ve discovered this semester while many of my friends are traveling the globe.
Upon saying goodbye to several of my closest friends at the end of last semester, I knew that my spring semester would come with a lot of big changes. So, in order to establish some structure, I set a goal to prioritize the things that I’ve always wanted to try at Oberlin but have never had time for. So far, I’m doing pretty well I think!
One of my new endeavors has been attending Barefoot Dialogue, a biweekly student-led group that meets to participate in a “vulnerability-based model of structured conversations” about topics chosen by the facilitators. The meetings are often focused around identity-based groups and always include a home-cooked meal at Lewis House, which hosts the Multifaith Chaplaincy and Sustained Dialogue offices. So far, this has been a great way to meet new people at Oberlin and has forced me to get outside my comfort zone a little when it comes to personal conversation.
I am also expanding my Oberlin horizons by auditing a class in the experimental college or ExCo. The ExCo I’m taking is called Performance Art Workshop, and each week we work together to showcase new projects we’ve been working on. Like dialogue, it has also been a great opportunity to meet new people. It’s been a good reminder that no matter how small Oberlin seems, there are always more people I haven’t met yet. The other thing that has been really nice about the ExCo is that it’s given me a lot more structure and routine for making creative work. Having a weekly deadline to share with other people has allowed me to generate much more art than I normally would.
The other new and exciting thing in my life is that I just got hired to be a tour guide! It’s been so rewarding to meet prospective and incoming students, and (as you can probably tell from my blogs) I really like getting to talk about my experience as an Oberlin student. I’ve really been enjoying having a job that allows me to walk around outside, and it has given me a great space to reflect on my time at Oberlin so far and how far I’ve come since I was a prospie.
Overall, I think what I’m learning this semester is that Oberlin will always have new opportunities to explore, even when it seems like you’ve tried everything already. Just the other day I went for a walk with my friend Hannah that took us to a part of the Oberlin arboretum that I’ve never been to before, and I was reminded that even though our campus is small, there will always some unexplored corner to keep me entertained. Or, at the very least, some sort of new club or activity that I’ve never tried before. Even though I’ve been here for three years, I feel like I will never run out of new things to try!
