From Seattle, with Love

I zipped up a flimsy blue raincoat this morning, leaving my quilted, insulated, windproof parka in the closet. Instead of balancing along icy brick walkways to English class at Richardson, I waded through a mist-bordering-on-downpour to another type of learning experience: my first job.

A snowy walk to Richardson

My final final exam three weeks ago preceded a whirlwind day of giving away everything too short or glittery for real life. I memorialized my last steps from the library, dining hall and beloved pool in kitschy Smartphone pictures, feeling not far from the high school senior who took my first St. Lawrence pictures in 2008. Hurried footsteps slid in a dusting of snow as I ran from my college home around 4 p.m., only three hours off schedule.  Somehow I resisted the urge to drive right back through the whole sad eight-hour drive home.

Maybe my first picture of me at St. Lawrence, all proud of my first dorm room in August 2008

I’m tempted to feel bad for my graduated self and think those footprints would be my last at St. Lawrence. But that’s just silly. This blog will disappear with SLU’s new website in early 2013, true; my “stlawu.edu” email address will meet the same fate in six to twelve months. While I’ll no longer address online shoe orders to 23 Romoda Drive, I’ve realized I’m looking forward to seeing that St. Lawrence address on at least four more envelops.

A weekend trip to Ottawa this December 2012

The first is my diploma, which I can only hope Dad will grab as he dumps the mailbox’s contents into his hungry wood stove at my home near Boston. The second two envelopes will come to my new Bainbridge Island address, a cozy “intern house” in the mossy suburbs of Seattle. There I’ll find checks from the Internship Fellowship program I applied for last fall, a help since my internship with nonprofit YES! Magazine is unpaid.

I think working a few months for free in exchange for a great house and bike is far better than barely scraping by for an unhappy apartment. And you could hardly call this work—it’s really glorified school, as I’m constantly learning, just with older classmates and no chapel bells.

They have Student Centers after college, right?

My job at the magazine just started, and the tweeting, Facebooking and newsletter-writing I’ll do on behalf of YES! For Teachers have hardly begun. But they will, and they will challenge me, in every way a media-based internship can challenge a liberal arts graduate coming off four years on the quad.

Like most of my classmates, I see this next step not as my ultimate career but as a skill-builder; a platform building toward a career by necessity so different from those of my parents’ generation. I might head toward education or writing or travel, or likely a job I've not yet discovered combining all three. I'm terrified I'll wind up like Hannah on Girls, minus the awkwardness if I'm at all lucky.

Regardless, savvy “tracker elves” in the Advancement office have an eye on me and all grads, waiting for the time to send one final piece of mail. As I work my way up from starving recent-grad to successful young professional, St. Lawrence will joyously send me one last piece of mail, this time asking for donations.

  Last hockey game, but only for a while.

Despite the "really, more money?" jokes, I look forward to my fourth—but really not final—piece of mail from St. Lawrence as chance to leave yet another footprint, beyond those left by my Admissions tours to future students through the class of 2017. Maybe by 2017 I’ll actually have something to give. For now, $5 is the best mark I can leave. Along with, maybe, a picture from the Space Needle. Goodbye for now St. Lawrence!

  and hello Seattle :)