Goodbye and good luck: Viewer seniors move on from MVNU: Autumn Weslow

“A lot has changed since freshman year”

It might be an English major sin to admit it, but I’m having a really hard time trying to come up with ways to describe my time at MVNU that aren’t totally cliché and awful. But it would also be a crime if I didn’t acknowledge that my experience at MVNU has been truly #lifechanging.

A lot has changed since freshman year: the occasional flicker finally matured into the eternal flame (aka the goblet of fire); we lost J-term- play-term; we got a new university president and a new chaplain; the Founders-to-Faculty awning disappeared; upperclassmen curfew was dissolved (yay!); chapel credits were reduced by 10 (double yay, which I probably shouldn’t admit, but hey, I like to sleep in!); apartments became semi-co-ed (meh); we have to drive an extra three minutes now every time we use the front entrance — I honestly feel like I could go on for days about this.

Other changes were more personal: I learned how to share a room with someone, I voluntarily embraced living in Pioneer for a second time to enforce the rules on people who hated quiet hours even more than I loved them, I traveled all across Italy and pretended I was in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” and I faced a myriad of totally new struggles along the way.

But even in the midst of all these external changes, it’s the internal ones that will stay with me the most. I learned how to be vulnerable, how to be patient (still working on that one, let’s be real), how to be kind even when I really didn’t want to, how to be present in a world rife with distraction. I learned the importance of taking time for myself in a community that’s so, well, communal.

I have gone on such an incredible journey during my time here — literally though because I live in Cypress this year, holla — and I honestly wouldn’t change any of it. As I finish my senior year and stand on the precipice of the world of adulting, I’m incredibly proud to say that I wouldn’t recognize the person I was four years ago at freshman orientation. I think she’d be proud of me, too.