To all the colleges I’ve loved before

I’ve moved dorms six times as an undergraduate and this September is my last. I’m lucky that my suite is housed in one of the newest dorms on campus. Especially important—it is among five out of 15 dorm buildings that have air conditioning as a refuge to the Southern California summer.

But the first time I moved into a college dorm, it was not in LA’s dry heat, but a New York summer—sticky and hot with humidity that made you want to stand under a shower all day. It was the only year that I had a roommate and our bedroom joined with two others in a shared living space, kitchen, and bathroom. It was located on Third and 12^th in the East Village, just a walk up from St. Mark’s Place. Our first fall, we had to deal with mice and people who smoked pot outside our windows as fumes entered our vents; but still, there was that excitement, that growing hum of comfort as you settle in, satisfaction in finding just the right place for décor and memories you’ve brought along. The adjustments and changes, arrangements like a young child fitting their mouth around the sound: home.

When I transferred, freshmen would ask me during orientation: Did you hate NYU? NYU was just no, right? You must be glad to no longer be there. I thought about going there, but thank God I didn’t.

—I loved it, I wanted to say to them. I loved the city, my roommates, the newspaper, the debate team. My internship was a few blocks from my dorm and in the late evening, Washington Square Park had this amber-colored light and the view of Empire State from Kimmel was incredible. I also saw its drawbacks, and I wanted more challenging academics, smaller classes, and research opportunity for humanities and social sciences.

So I couldn’t answer their questions. I knew they weren’t looking for a complex understanding of NYU with its beautiful moments and difficult flaws. They were fresh to college, seeking validation for their own choice in Pomona. A year later, when I came back after doing a semester at Barnard, students crooned: Even those that leave us, come back! I was frustrated at how my decisions were being co-opted for their own pride that I didn’t share. But I was too worried about my family, the people in-and-out of the hospital who brought me back to California, to argue with them. So here I am: a senior at Pomona College, still trying to grapple with my patchwork of the last five years, trying to find the bigger picture in a very crooked road.

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When I began writing this, I asked my friend if my view of Claremont was complex enough. “I don’t think so,” they said, looking up from their homework. They tell me, that for them, it is about community. They feel like there is a common nerd-culture that they connect with and, at the risk of sounding naïve, they admit that they love being associated with the idea of the college—even if they’re aware it doesn’t always hold up in reality. “I like it here,” they said. “I’m happy to be here as a senior. I really like it.”

I can’t picture a better place for them either.

“Can you think of any silver lining?” they asked, “Do you think you’ve grown?”

I also grew at NYU and Barnard, I said.

“But any growth specific to this place? There has to be a silver lining looking back.”

I’ve grown here, but I also wonder if I’ve changed too much. My differences from the broader “Pomona culture” has made me better at both standing my ground and being more flexible. I’ve grappled with the fact that sometimes friends dismiss or exclude me from conversations where I don’t agree. In disagreeing with “cancel culture,” I forced myself to be more accepting, more empathetic, more tolerating on all sides. I’m stronger. But it’s also made me more defensive, more pragmatic, more tired. For someone who was already an introvert and told to speak up all of high school, I’ve learned to talk even less (smile more). I’ve learned to lower expectations for others and maintain high expectations for myself. It made me stronger, but I never wanted to be strong at this point in my life.

This year, when I was packing to move back to college, I found a series of letters I had written in my senior year of high school, addressed to my senior self in college. My cursive is more uniform, softer around the edges, and it’s punctuated with desperation: Do you like college? Is it everything you hoped? Did you find your people? Are you happy?

I want to reach back to my 17-year-old self, look her in the eyes, and tell her that she’s capable of more strength than she believes. I want to tell her that she’s so much smarter than she thinks she is. Even though her friends are going to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—she’ll have her pick of top liberal arts colleges soon. Let her know those scars don’t define her, everyone is too caught up in their own pain to notice. I want to tell her that she’ll never get a worse grade in college than in high school. Remind her that she can be both a Politics and English major. I want to tell her that even if she feels emotionally bankrupt, there is more in her than she knows, stores of empathy she hasn’t even begun to tap, because she will need them again and again. Let her know it’s okay to feel something as silly as liking a guy, even when your whole life feels like it can’t take anymore. Tell her, you don’t need to break away from the chaos of family, you just need to learn how to stand up for yourself. But I cannot answer the questions she asks either.

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This year, I was the first person to move into our suite, so I spent a good deal of time rearranging furniture again and again. Late at night, I was still awake, unable to sleep or shake the feeling that something was wrong. It was already midnight, but I turned on the lights and began shifting my furniture. For the next hour and a half, I moved most of my furniture into the hallway, and in a slow push-and-pull process, turned my bed 180° and across the room. I wasn’t sure if one of my suitemates was sleeping, so I tried to be quiet. I imagined one of them finding me at one in the morning, a trail of furniture in exodus from my room, and their inevitable concern for my coping habits. Eventually, I brought the furniture back, re-plugged the refrigerator, and laid down again on my bed. It still didn’t feel right, but I was too tired and went to sleep. But that unsettled feeling stays.

To be fair, NYU didn’t fit immediately either. The first week, I spent my night, unable to sleep, panicking if I made a mistake—if my mother was right, if I should have stayed in the Bay Area, if I should have gone to the family flagship and commute from home, sleeping in my own bed. But by October, I was headed back from New Jersey with the debate team, falling asleep on my feet as my debate partner handed me one side of her earbuds. It played BØRNS, and we both leaned back against the train walls. “We’re headed home,” she said. I repeated the word home, as if relearning the word like a young child, all over again. I closed my eyes and sunk into 10,000 Emerald Pools in one ear—the other listening to the whirl of train rails running into the city.

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During my letter cleaning, I didn’t just find letters from my high school self, I also found acceptance letters from when I applied to transfer. “Why do you keep them?” my mom asked.

I didn’t have an answer immediately, but after tossing most of them out, I went back to her with an answer. “At the time, those letters—from schools I would have thought of as reaches—felt like my greatest academic achievement.”

“You don’t have to throw them out,” she said, gently.

 I try to be careful in picking my words. “Now it’s a reminder that I had choices. Pomona just feels like it was the wrong one.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. When first I received those letters in the summer of 2017, I had thought that I had overcome the most difficult part of transferring. I was wrong.

When I transferred college, Pomona was not my choice. I was thrilled to be going to Barnard in the fall, but after arguing with my mother, I caved. In the next month, I bought a Sagehen T-shirt, meticulously filled out forms, and read Strangers in Their Own Land. I studied the orientation schedule and mapped out my dorm. But the troubles were never-ending: the registrar messing up my credits, the dean blaming transfers for confusion at dinner, the chaos of signing up for classes, an advisor in the music department who misunderstood the reality of being a transfer, etc. Two years later and the problems still continue: the registrar still refuses to accept all my courses and earlier this month, their audit ignored my transfer credits.

But in my first semester as a transfer, I held out hope. Another transfer emphasized how the social scene and fellow students made it feel like home. I agreed to go with them to a student Halloween party with our friends. They got written up for alcohol before the night started, but they hung back to do cocaine, while myself and two other friends waited in the hallway—worried about running late. The group made another stop at a dorm, getting baked while I stood outside because the smell of marijuana gives me migraines. At the party, two male students groped me and one of them blew pot in my face. I lost my friends and then my voice looking for them. I learned the next morning that three had left for another party and two, who I made introductions for that night, left to hook up and intentionally “lost” me. So there I was, on November 1^st, walking back to my dorm, alone, tired, and sober. As I crossed 8^th Street, between CMC and Pomona, it was dead silent. The community, the people, the students—it felt further away and I was grateful for it. I was irritated by friends who knew I never participated in drugs, but had me chaperone, only to leave without a heads-up. I was tired of trying and being left behind on every front: administration, registrar, social scene. As I crossed Marston Quad, I sat down on the lawn and cried for a bit. I was 2500 miles closer to my hometown than in New York, but I never felt further from home.

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So why did you come back to Pomona?

I didn’t realize how many people would jump to conclusions until students began say to my face: Even those that leave us come back—channeling me into an example for something I don’t believe in. People assumed that I realized I made a mistake or gained an “appreciation for California weather” as my grandaunt wrote on Facebook. (Last weekend, as I was putting up posters in Pitzer’s 103° weather, I recalled her face and wanted to punch her through the screen.)

But the answer is so much more complicated.

When I entered Pomona as a junior in the fall, after transferring out and returning, I found myself at a birthday party for a friend—sober, waving away marijuana smoke, and too tired for the pounding music in a sweltering room that made my clothes stick to my skin and my hair damp against my neck. It was a reminder that the social scene, which I encountered on Halloween, was exactly the same. At some point in the night, I was sitting on a bench in the courtyard, waiting for my friends to get back from doing cocaine in the bathroom, and offhandedly mentioned how I missed my Barnard friends in New York.

A friend of mine said, “You’ll never be happy anywhere, Helena.”

I couldn’t respond. In fact, I couldn’t say anything for a long while, even after my friends returned, giggling. Those words cut me under the skin—I could almost hear my sternum crack from the breath I was holding in. It wouldn’t be the last time I’ve heard this from friends who insinuated that I was the problem. At the time, I let them convince me that I was.

A year later, I reassess the moment: It wasn’t until three weeks before that party, that I called Barnard to tell them that I wasn’t coming back that semester. I pulled my housing mid-July and told one friend, but I didn’t come to terms with it until August. At Barnard, I had spoken with an Barnard advisor and learned the cost of having spent a semester at Pomona. I wouldn’t be able to double major, much less study abroad. I wouldn’t be able to do a 4+1 BA/MA that Barnard offered because I only had one semester to fit in requirements before the application was due. I wouldn’t be able to join debate team because they only accepted new people in the fall—but also didn’t accept juniors. I wouldn’t be able to join some student organizations that focused on hiring freshmen and sophomores. It was painful to know that I could have, had I entered a semester before—when I intended to. I couldn’t enjoy being a Barnard student, because I couldn’t really be one. Being there, seeing the opportunities, knowing that I couldn’t do those things hurt.

But I also understand that a lot of my decision to return to Pomona was based on family—at least three relatives were in-and-out of the hospital on a regular basis. My grandfather was dealing with cancer—and this past month, he passed away. My sister had an unexpected, high-risk pregnancy—she had the child in February, and recently moved to Toronto for graduate school. My grandmother’s dementia is still progressing, my other grandfather was going through a series of surgeries. “When it rains it pours,” my mother said that year. I felt selfish, focusing on myself in New York and thought about moving closer to home in case of emergency—Claremont is still 2500 miles closer, no matter how much less it feels like home.

So when friends and classmates expressed pride in my return because they thought it reflected on Pomona’s quality, I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to have share all this family-stuff that wasn’t wholly mine to tell (and truth be told, I still feel uncomfortable with what I’ve shared so far). Instead, my decision reflects on the issues completely outside—not always mine, and not always fair. 

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I spoke with my advisor about a week ago and she used the word monolithic to describe the Claremont Colleges. Despite the diversity that the colleges host from ethnic, racial, gender identity or financial backgrounds, there is unified experience built around entering college at 17 or 18 years-old and living four years in that same community. Other colleges and universities do not have that unified experience—the UCs are filled with people of different ages, even my time at Barnard had older GS students from a variety of lives already lived. But at the Claremont Colleges: that sense of community, unity, and academic membership—that is the promise, the gift, the packaged picture on the shiny brochure.

In comparison to the other Claremont students, my own experience is a Frankenstein creation. I’ve mixed-and-matched parts, stitching them together like a body, trying to construct a thing of beauty through these self-picked pieces. On the other hand, it’s a monstrous thing, and occasionally, even I am horrified by what I have done. It is not the dream of beauty and idyllic college experience that Pomona promises to their students. Instead, it’s a strange, twisted, and freakish experience that I’m still learning to navigate and love—all while others project their own fears and insecurities onto it.

But more recently, students and readers have been reaching out to me. Last week, I met with a classmate for coffee to talk about transferring, and her own curiosity about leaving and coming back. Another student who I am mentoring for a different program, asked me about my own experience as a transfer student at Pomona. In September, as I was midway through writing this piece, I received an email:

 (The message has been edited and condensed for clarity, and to preserve the anonymity of the author, who has given permission.)

At the end of last spring at [5C College], I got a transfer offer from a prestigious program and I accepted it. I went back and forth with the decision for a long time and now, I’ve come to the realization that I’m pretty sure I’m going to regret it. My feelings and what had originally motivated me to transfer has shifted. You know the 5Cs—my experience was a rollercoaster from start to finish. When I got the offer, I was in my acceptance/neutral stage. It was the possibility, the “what if”-s, and the potential opportunities that haunted me and pushed me to my decision. But in retrospect, I also think I was pressured—after other people found out I had gotten in, it felt obvious to everyone else and they made it apparent to me that I should take it and leave. 

I’m so scared about losing everything I built up in Claremont (extracurricular commitments, including leadership positions) and what would happen to all the relationships I made? If we are using the ex-boyfriend = ex-college comparison, my current boyfriend goes to [5C college] right now (so in the analogy, maybe he’s best friends with my ex), which is a great and emotionally tormenting cherry on top to all of this. I came across your blog because he mentioned you once that, actually, he knew someone who had transferred out of Pomona, and transferred back. So it was possible, and someone had done it.

How has your transition back to the 5cs been? Obviously, we have two different stories and it’s not going to be the same across the board, but I was curious about how the past year has gone for you and how accommodating the 5Cs is with transferring back. And I may be getting a little too personal here, but do you think you made the right choice?

–Just Another Transfer

Dear Just Another Transfer,

A week ago, when I expressed frustration that college has been such a hit-and-miss, one of my friends asked, “But you’re going to graduate school, right? You have more college to experience.” But the answer is that I don’t know. I’m not applying this year, and for all I know, this coming spring marks the end of my higher education. When I told them this, they responded by saying that they still think I’ll go to grad school eventually—but it drove me crazy because they’re not seeing the situation that I’m in now.

Being back at the 5Cs is both easy and difficult. It was easy because Pomona’s administration never actually let me transfer out. When I told them I was leaving for Barnard—the Dean refused to acknowledge it and instead claimed that I was on “leave of absence.” It was easy in the sense that my friends are still very much the same, the culture is the same, and returning feels like nothing has changed at all. But it’s not easy for those same issues—nothing changes if you go away or come back. Those same problems are going to be here, those same people, those same frustrations, and those same heartaches will still be waiting for you, regardless of how you change in your own time.

It hasn’t been easy as a person. I often think about how one of my closest friend at Pomona once looked at me with a straight face and deadpanned, “I don’t understand how you ended up here,” because of my personality and my priorities in life. Occasionally, I also wonder how much easier it would be to enjoy Pomona if I only focused on the things that I disliked at other places. I would probably be happier, more grateful, more content to be where I am if I could forget half of my time as an undergraduate. At best, they made me different, and at worst, they made me alienated and alone. But I refuse to give them up. Not for all the Pomona-s and Claremont Colleges in the world.

I will always carry a torch for NYU. I still miss the creative writing brownstone, the red lounge in the CAS building, the walk to Washington Square News on Broadway, walks around the city with some incredible professors, and a debate team that made me feel like I found my thing. I’m overwhelmingly grateful for the roommates–Kameron and Chelsea–who I had there because being a freshman is scary and I’m glad I had those girls to tackle it with. NYU was a place I knew that I outgrew when my professor told me to transfer to a more academic heavy culture, and recommended both Barnard and Pomona. But I never regret having gone there in the first place. I still love Barnard with my entire heart. I miss the community that made me feel, for the first time, really proud to be a woman. I still miss the girls who checked in on each other during a night out. I miss my sorority sisters and transfer friends, and late night in JJ’s. I miss Butler library, quiet nights in the Zora Neal Hurston lounge, the view from Hewitt with fresh snow in the quad, the greenhouse on-top of Milstein, the strong women professors that made me want to be just like them when I grow up.

American author Katherine Dunn writes in her book Geek Love, through the character of Mama Lil, “Go ahead and love her.” Go ahead and love her. Go ahead and love her. Whether that is your new college or your old one, go ahead and love whatever there is to love. Whether you change colleges again or decide to stay–don’t be afraid. It’s worth finding the best and worst parts to love and carry with you.

A year ago as I was sitting alone at a party, having just switched colleges for the -nth time, I let people convince me that I was the problem. But I will tell you now and I will tell you again, and I will tell any transfer student who asks me about their college decision. You are not the problem. No matter what decision you make–to stay, to go, to go to community college, to drop out of college entirely–it is right. They say that our decisions determine who we are, but no matter what college path you decide to take–you are right. No college is capable of making you wrong. You are right in whatever college you choose.

Since returning to Claremont, I admit there is a desperation in my attempts to love Pomona. I’ve worked so hard to settle down roots. As a double major and hopeful double minor, I’m stretched myself across four departments; I’m on senior staff of the newspaper; I lead a student academic journal; and I volunteer for two other organizations. I’ve entrenched myself as deeply as I could, but I still feel rootless. But I’ve made do with what I have, and I’ve tried to love every place I’ve been. So this is my situation—desperately trying to love her. But that also sums up most of life’s relationships and the connections we create. We are all seeking something to love, something to cherish, something to hold our own—whether that is a lover, a child, a college, an experience, a sports team, a relationship, a moment in time, or even the way the sunrises through your windows.

Then there are days when I’m lying on the grass in Marston Quad and I feel like I’ve been here forever. But when BØRNS comes on the radio—for a moment, I’m on a train back from New Jersey, thinking about debate and the question of US militarization. My suite-mate recently began listening to the Hamilton soundtrack about four years behind—and for a moment, when I hear it, I’m reminded of my first roommate, a Tischie who played Hamilton non-stop. When I hear Taylor Swift’s 1989 album, I’m at Joe’s coffee next to Parsons, buying supplies from Blick craft store. I catch a certain scent in the air, suddenly I’m ducking into a restaurant during a downpour after visiting the Met and I eat the best slice of New York pizza I’ve ever had. There are mornings, before I open my eyes, where I make the mistake of thinking I’m in my blue-walled dorm at Barnard—about to see the snow outside of my window.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WatAKl8NzYU