“This isn’t how I expected my last semester at Westmont to go,” I reflected, as my papers swirled away from me in the wind and the tent poles above me creaked ominously. I briefly weighed whether or not this tent would blow down a second time; it collapsed during Christmas break, which was why I was sitting in the gym parking lot and not on Winter lawn. “I’d give it a 30 percent chance,” I decided.
After Dr. Beebe's announcement that we won't have in-person classes for the first month of school, many of us are missing Westmont more than usual.
I’ve got great news: you no longer have to wait until September 28 for the Westmont experience—you can recreate it from the comfort of your own home! Here are three ways you can really get into the Westmont spirit, no matter where you are.
Do you remember the meme that said, “I don’t know what will happen in [x] years. I don’t have 2020 vision,” where x was the number of years until 2020?
How right we all were: No one saw this year coming. A pandemic threw the entire world into chaos and disrupted all our plans. As Westmont struggled with the legacy of racism in our institution and in our community, despicable violence by police officers against black civilians displayed the evil of racism on a national scale.
This is a post written by our very first guest writer, Ellie Ford! Ellie is a dear friend of mine, and she wrote this reflection about coming home from Westmont in Cairo all too soon.
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Entering self-isolation straight off of a semester in Egypt is a little like running a 100-meter sprint only to careen into a pool of molasses at the 75-meter mark.
“I keep thinking of students who are in love…” Dan Chiasson reflects on college students’ pain during the time of COVID-19 in his article in The New Yorker, “The Coronavirus and the Ruptured Narrative of Campus Life.” For a few paragraphs, he mourns for those students who are in love, whether with “a subject, or an author, or a form of attention or concentration,” or another person. He mentions the loss of physical contact in a loving interpersonal relationship and the loss of the home that a campus can be.
As a second-semester junior, I’ve been reflecting on my time at Westmont. Recently, I’ve contemplated the strange phenomenon in which the first-years seem to get younger and younger every year (that’s how it works, right?). That made me think of how I viewed upperclass students as a first-year and how that view has changed since becoming one myself. I would like to provide a few explanations for some of the odd behaviors you may observe in upperclass students on campus.
Odd Behavior: Lurking suspiciously around campus events while holding tupperware.