“An opportunity is nothing more than favorable circumstance,” Rance Davis ’80, stated with conviction as he stood before me and fourteen other of the university’s Higher Education Opportunity Program pre-freshman-summer students. The rest, the Associate Dean of Student Life claimed in July of 2008, is what you do with it.
Favorable circumstance. For St. Lawrence University’s HEOP class of 2012, that meant classes five days a week, waking early in the morning and working late into the night -- going to dinner and getting back to Whitman Hall just in time to spend another several hours in study hall sessions finishing work due the next morning. It meant attending “college success” every day at 8a.m. and again at 3p.m., during which our counselors Bill Short, Nick Hillary, and Erin Colvin, introduced guest speakers that gave us the advice they deemed most valuable. Rance Davis spoke about how to stay out of trouble, Associate Professor of Psychology Pamela Thacher about her research on the unfortunate side effects of sleep deprivation, and counselor Daniel Hernandez about appropriate ways of dealing with grief. Perhaps most simply, favorable circumstance meant the chance to prove that hard work still counted for something, and to do so in the best of company.
The obvious conclusion to draw from the newfound self-esteem I’m able to demonstrate this Fall on campus is that, put in a completely new and demanding academic environment, I learned things about myself I didn't already know. This is of course true, but I find it important to stress that the means by which I learned the most wasn’t so much the academic situation I was in as the other people that shared it with me. On June 29th I sat in the lower lounge of Whitman dormitory with shaking hands, knowing that I would shortly be asked to introduce myself and to share my story; it was one that I’d lived by and would be difficult to articulate in two or three sentences. The solution I found was to first take the time to listen.
Trevor Sanders, 18, from Mt. Vernon, NY, stood tall as he said he felt in having the opportunity to attend St Lawrence “he had been saved.” Jasmin Garcia, 18, of Queens, NY, spoke of her plans to attend medical school. Ericka Vasquez, also from Queens, talked about feminism and social justice, and all that they had come to mean to her.
The 15 of us would go through many activities designed to facilitate our bonding: “mosey tag”, making and maneuvering our way through a rope spider web, and blind-folded trust tests all included. My summer at St. Lawrence, though, would be more so defined by the rooms like the Whitman lounge, and the reverent words spoken in them.
Weeks later I would sit in Hepburn Hall and hear the same Trevor Sanders who had talked earlier about salvation recount the time he had been thrown out of a store for the color of his skin. In a similar hall. Jasmin Garcia had me proofread an essay that described her struggles paying bills in her mother’s absence; in our dorm room one night, Ericka spoke of life at home with an autistic brother.
These same people were the ones I laughed with in the Whitman computer lab while watching YouTube videos. They joked about my mispronunciation of words and how living just shy of the Canadian Border will do that to a person. I likewise joked about Trevor and Isaiha Pounds, 18, from Bronx, NY, managing to canoe backwards down the Grasse River, and Jasmin and Diomedes Gonzalez, 18, and also from Bronx, squealing as they braved their way into the water surrounding the nearby Lampson falls. We chose to laugh about these differences, understanding their lack of importance in the long run.
In my new friends I not only saw the overcoming of hardship, I saw why they were at St Lawrence to begin with; they had earned the $50,000 some-odd dollars a year allotted to them -- every penny. Against all odds they had succeeded, overcoming devastating circumstances to say with conviction: “I’m here anyway.” In what was a sudden revelation, I was forced to consider that as I stood in the same rooms with them, I must also be there not due any kind of lottery system, but to worth. The result was that for the first time in my life I knew I had earned what I'd received, and that I was entitled to that clarity.
In simplest terms, the summer of 2008 St. Lawrence University’s HEOP class of 2012 had on campus was a favorable circumstance. What made it special is the advantage we took of it and the experiences we shared. To learn. To live. To grow.
