Four years and an education for a lifetime later, I am starting to realize it is time to say goodbye to my time at Siena. Does it hurt like hell? Sure does. But, am I beyond blessed for everything Siena has given me? Absolutely. Arriving to orientation in the fall of 2015, I was anxious, hopeful, and honestly a little terrified. I came from a very small high school with a graduating class of 86 students, and it took me a whole summer to recognize that college was going to be very different. I knew I had the opportunity to meet many new friends here and participate in numerous organizations where I would hopefully find my calling. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do, or what I was meant to do, but Siena helped me get one step closer to figuring those things out.
Meeting my roommate for the first time was one of the moments I’ll never forget about my time here. All I kept thinking before entering Plassmann 434 was, “Will she like me? Will she think I’m too smiley? Will we get along? Will this be my roommate for four years?” To this day, we are still roommates, living in the townhouses now with our other two best friends that we connected with freshman year. I think that’s the thing about Siena. You meet people who you never want to be without. My housemates and I have plans to be in each other’s weddings, and though we will be living in all different parts of the country come May, I know we will forever be connected.
Every single year had its perks, but I knew that when my younger sister told me her news in the spring of my sophomore year, my Siena experience would change: Lauren would be joining me here. She began her freshman year in the fall of 2017, and we shared our first semester together before I studied abroad. Siena already felt so much like home, but having Lauren here with me made it that much homier. It was during that fall that I also met my soulmate (cheesy, I know), but I’ve never been more in love. Nicole and I have been dating for one and a half years now, and I will always thank Siena for giving me her.
Leaving to go abroad was certainly hard, and though I had the amazing opportunity to spend five months in Scotland and travel to eight different countries, I have never missed Siena, and the people at Siena, more. Coming back for my senior year was bittersweet. I was beyond excited to be back, but I knew it would all be over in a blink. The first semester always goes by way too quickly, and by second semester we were getting smacked in the face with the idea that we have to supposedly “have our lives together” after graduation. After much searching and networking, I have landed myself a job at ADP [Automatic Data Processing] and I know that everything I have learned as a math major here will help me succeed in my new role. I may not necessarily know exactly what I want to do for the rest of my life just yet, but I’m only 22 years old. No one can expect me to know all that at this point, but after coming here I am more confident that I can be anything I want to be. I do know that I want to keep Siena a part of me, always. I want to be as generous as our friars, as intelligent as our professors, as genuine as our students, and as supportive as our community. I want to take Siena’s values with me and change someone’s world, as Siena did for me. Somehow, someway, I think I was supposed to end up here, as a Saint. Thank you Siena College, I’ll never forget you.
