WHAT

ARE YOU

TAKING AWAY

FROM

SWARTHMORE?

In September 1996, we asked members of the Class of 2000, then on campus just a few weeks, to tell us what they had brought to Swarthmore that was of personal significance to them. Photographer Eleftherios Kostans, in his first assignment for the November 1996 Bulletin, photographed several first-year students and their "things from home" for an article about the freshman experience by Carrie Griffin '99.

For the past four years, I've nodded hello to them as we passed in the halls or encountered each other in the snack bar. Because they had appeared in these pages, I watched their lives at Swarthmore a little more closely. Through those pictures and those objects--a horseshoe, a bottle of California sand, a pair of red clogs, a quilt, a lucky charm, and a precious photograph of a loved one--I had come to know them.

Now these students are graduating, and I had to wonder, "What are they taking away from Swarthmore?" Their answers to this question illuminate personal odysseys that are both typical and atypical; these are unique individuals, yet they are part of the fabric of life at the College. Somehow I have the feeling that we'll be seeing them again.
--Jeffrey Lott

Eva Allan

The Lang Music Building, twixt the campus and the Crum Woods, has been a second home for me these four years. During my first hours at Swarthmore, I wheeled my gigantic harp crate into Room 410, a room I was soon calling "the harp room." It had a desk and chair, two pianos, a cabinet, and a plethora of percussion instruments; soon I had my own key to that room and spent many hours there studying and playing harp and violin. The next year, the College acquired a Balinese gamelan (Swarthmore still needs its own harp), and the Western percussion instruments were replaced with glimmering red and gold gongs and bells and cymbal-filled turtles. The room was soundproofed, repainted, and healthily humidified, and I began dancing with the gamelan ensemble, leaving my red shoes outside the door. The coexistence of my harp with the gamelan was like Anna visiting the King of Siam. Such friendships as these I will not soon forget.

Laura Pyle

I still have Sebastian's shoe hanging above my door and will probably hang it above my next door on the theory that luck will be welcome. Now, however, I also refer to "the Scottish play" and say "break a leg" to keep the spirits happy.

While at Swarthmore, I've majored in philosophy, danced jigs and flamenco, and traveled around Sri Lanka. But my most significant take-away is the theater bug. I discovered in Abbe Blum's Shakespeare course that I love to act, and I've been exploring theater since. I've acted in several student productions, been on technical crew, and am spending my last semester taking four theater courses and working in the costume shop.

"So what are you going to do with that?" I hear regularly. Not much of a change from the usual reaction to my philosophy major, really, though theater prompts more waitressing jokes. I'm going to work in theater, I hope. I've been offered a summer internship with the Arts Center in Old Forge, N.Y., and in the fall, I'll go to Philadelphia or New York or wherever I can find another theater job and an apartment that allows cats. I have Shakespearean aspirations, tentative M.F.A. plans, and an existentialist play building in my mind as I shuttle between rehearsals and my senior philosophy comps.

Chris Fanjul

I hope the day I graduate is partly cloudy, with a slight breeze to rustle the leaves around the amphitheater and make dancing shadows on the ground. I don't plan to focus on the solemnity of the occasion. College is not about solemn things.

I plan to sit back with my cap over my eyes and redream the dreams that have passed through me like warm spring air when the car window is down: Driving to the West Coast with a friend, through canyons, across deserts, where that cop pulled us over so we wouldn't hit any stray cows. Finding beaches where ecstasy lives in the salty air. Whispers across an open window that infuse quiet contemplation with life and presence.

What does this have to do with an academic life? Everything and nothing. Swarthmore is a part of the story that cannot be removed because it was part of my life of learning--not just at school but everywhere. I realize now that there was no way I could escape learning. That's what one does. It needs no special recognition.

That is part of one of my greatest lessons: how to be. How not to think too much, to watch the leaves and dance in the wind. This lesson is incomplete, and I have the rest of my life to learn it.

Nadia Murray

Throughout my adolescent years, I have had several dramatic experiences. Some have been good, but most have not. The death of my mother, Olive May Findlaytor, and of my grandmother, Margaret McFarlane, have been the most traumatic.

For four years, Swarthmore has been a safe haven, a home away from home for me. I found professors and friends who are like family. They have helped me through the good as well as the bad times. When my grandmother died last year, I thought that I was going to suffer a breakdown. But my surrogate family here helped me through it.

These experiences have changed me and made me a better person, and Swarthmore has definitely played a part in this. Without the support that I have received, I do not know if I would have made it this far. The deaths of my mother and grandmother have made me realize that we should not take life for granted. We need to make the best of life because we do not know when we are going to lose it.

Lance Langdon

As I finish papers and knock down exams one by one, I'm asking myself: How has Swarthmore changed me? Swarthmore has made me a relativist.

What do I mean? I mean I've thought so much about the ways things should or shouldn't be that I can't function in the way things are. Swarthmore made me examine "the structure" repeatedly. Racism, classism, modernism, progressivism---they're all my bed buddies now. When I fluff my pillow at night, I can't help but think about the poor guy who sewed the neoprene seams and what neoprene bushes were slaughtered. But the best I can do is fluff again and go to sleep. I'm globally aware and existentially immobile.

Starting next week, I'll be making the bed I lie in, and it scares me to death.

I can't really tell anyone what I've learned because, unlike my friends at other colleges, I haven't been trained for this world. While I've been theorizing these four years, they've been learning how to be cops, industrial designers, and Air Force pilots.

What all that means is that if you want to really know what Swarthmore has given me, you'd better not ask me. Just come and visit in 10 years, and see what I'm doing. I'll even give you a neoprene pillow to sleep on.

Samira Mehta

What am I taking away from Swarthmore? I'm sure there are intangible things, but I don't have enough distance to know. Of course, I've changed, but anything I could tell you now would be conjecture.

I do, however, have a very clear picture of the concrete things I'm taking with me. I'm leaving with books. Lots and lots of books. And I plan to spend the next couple of years revisiting books that I read very quickly under a deadline or finishing books that I only read assigned portions of.

In addition to my school books, there's a leather-bound volume of Jane Austen that a close friend from freshman year gave me for Christmas. We're still close. I also have the book she gave me this year--a fictionalized account of a murder that I studied in a history class. At home are the volumes of poetry that she gave me in the years in between.

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