So, having survived the worst of the end of the year craziness (and feeling entirely un burnt-out!!) I am now cleaning up my stuff in preparation for moving out of my rental house in a week & a bit.
Insane, right? How did this year go by so fast!?
As I pack up piles of paperwork (and also finally part with some of the stuff I have been holding on to the last few years) I can’t help but marvel at everything I’ve done while at Brescia.
The evidence:
This is just the beginning...
- A box of like 20+ course packs and textbooks
- Two massive binders of Students’ Council notes
- A folder of Long Term Planning Committee notes
- Two truly humungous binders of all my class notes for the last two years
- A folder of material from when I did a placement at the Nokee Kwe Native Literacy Program
- A bunch of resources from Student Services programming at Brescia (like Leadership Certificate)
- Contracts from when I was an Educational Resident Assistant, Get Real Camp Coordinator, and Girls LEAD Camp Coordinator
- 2 class yearbooks
- Contact information & notes from the Women’s Education Worldwide Student Leadership Conference (which remains one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had- I watched the video last night & shed a few tears)
- Various notes, letters, and thank you cards from awesome people
Some of the stuff I found made me nostalgic (like my yearbooks), some of it made me proud (like my 2nd year research papers), some of it amazed me (did I REALLY put that much thought and effort into Students’ Council planning? I have like a 6 page document of my goals for the year, almost all of which were accomplished thanks to the dedicated group of women I worked with) and some of it made me cringe (although I learned a lot from those less-than-perfect experiences).
I can’t believe how fast the last four years went by, although there were times that felt like they could not go by fast enough (like when I had 5 classes, a placement, a Students’ Council Presidency AND an unexpected surgery to deal with).
While I know that I am grateful for my time at Brescia, I think that I sometimes underestimate the extent of the impact it has had on my life. Sometimes the impact may have been less than ideal (e.g. stress, sleepless nights, and a much-too-large workload on occasion), but ultimately all the experiences I’ve had here have shaped who I’ve become- in small unnoticeable ways, and in big obvious ones (I don’t think all women are complete airheads any more!).
As I pack up the past , I am also looking forward to the possibilities in my future. I feel really fortunate that my time at Brescia has helped shaped me into the woman I KNOW I want to be, and has helped put me on a path I feel great about. Because of my time here, I feel much more confident leading groups, more aware of social inequality, more solid in my own identity, more comfortable living on my own, more able to conduct research, and so many more things that I know will help me to be who I want to be.