I went on a walk with my friend Jake yesterday. Jake graduated in 2o15 and becoming friends with him was one of the jewels of my time as an RA. We around campus like we used to do with our boss who left to work in Abu Dhabi. As we were walking and talking, I became aware just how unbelievable it is that I am graduating later this week. I remember when I started my sophomore year, when I had just met Jake. Then, I’d had an overwhelming feeling that I needed to fully appreciate the limited time I had at this place with people like Jake. I’m lucky that Jake has been around this year and I’ve gotten to spend several afternoons with him talking about writing fiction and writing a thesis.
That is how I define my last semester of college: constant writing. I wrote two theses. I’m still too close to the experience to feel a full sense of accomplishment, and I am worried that it will seem like I’m bragging if I bring it up too much in conversations. I was also writing fiction for the Advanced Fiction Workshop. I wrote two stories, one a final draft that I submitted to a literary magazine yesterday, the other a rough draft that I hope to revise over the summer. In that rough draft, I tried my hand at writing earthquake fiction of my own. I was caught up in the amazing worlds of Ozeki and Murakami, and I’ll be glad to return to it with clearer eyes after a few months.
Overall, my senior spring was an amazing capstone. I came full circle in a lot of ways. I returned to Keats and Latour, two people I first “met” my freshman year. I discovered new things, mainly fiction writing. The books I read for my ENVS thesis brought together so many different things I’ve learned through out the major. It should be required reading for ENVS 330. It was so fun to read Paul Steinberg’s Who Rules the Earth? with the ENVS 160 students. I felt like that book was a great introduction to the major – situated context and breadth courses and all!
To any ENVS 160 students or prospective majors reading this: prepare to have your mind quietly blown by the ENVS faculty, by the breadth courses, by the opportunities that ENVS at LC present you over and over. Many of the best courses offered by the best professors at Lewis & Clark are affiliated with ENVS. There are abroad programs and there are research opportunities for those longing for a taste of environmental science. For more information about how I feel about the ENVS department, please visit my Spotify playlist “third floor of howard.”