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The Real Holy Cross Experience

For the past couple of entries, I’ve talked about how wonderful my Holy Cross experience has been (is? was? I’m not sure which tense I should really be using.). If I had to isolate just why my Holy Cross experience has been (again, tense?) so incredible, I’d say that it was (is?) because of the people – the friends that I’ve made, the professors who have changed my life, the faculty and supporting staff who provided all of these opportunities. So, I’ve decided to deluge you all with photos from my four years at Holy Cross of all of the people who have made my time on the Hill such a wonderful experience. It’s my way of thanking them all for everything. These photos aren’t in chronological order at all – it’s just a montage from all four years. Although, you might be able to decipher what year it was based upon my hair cut and color. I should really just retitle this blog “the many hair styles/adventures of Colleen.”

What’s so fantastic (in my opinion) is that these 82 photos (and counting) hardly scratch the surface of the many photos that I took throughout my four years at Holy Cross. They barely begin to cover all of the memories, experiences, and adventures that I had on the Hill and beyond.

To everyone in these photos – thank you for the incredible memories. If I could, I’d go back and relive every single moment. Since I am (was?) an English major, I’ll leave you with some lines from WB Yeats (as recommended to me by a fellow Crusader alum, Ted ’84):

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.

– “The Municipal Gallery Re-Visited”
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Back to Basics

(For those of you who have been waiting for the massive photo entry, please bear with me. There are a few technical difficulties, but it will be up soon!)

Since I’ve been back home, I’ve been cleaning my room like no other. When you add it all up, I’ve only been home for 6 weeks in the past year. I didn’t have time to unpack all of my documents and books from Oxford when I came back in August, and I was too sick in December to do anything but worry about the time I was losing on my thesis research. Well, as I was cleaning out my room, I came across a huge mountain of papers and articles from my year at Oxford. As I was going through them, I found one really interesting document – it was the first draft of my thesis proposal. I had scrawled at the top, “No good.” I’m not sure if I was referring to the actual draft or the topic itself, but I had to laugh since the finished version was staring right at me on the next shelf in my bookshelf. It’s funny how a year can change things.

In other thesis news, I spent this past weekend with my sister in Savannah, GA, where Flannery O’Connor was born. And, yes, of course I stopped by her house.

Visiting O’Connor’s house and finding that first thesis draft just brought me back to where I was a year ago. I was still in England at the time, and I was preparing to re-acclimate myself to my “normal” life at Holy Cross and in America in general. I was beyond nervous about my work, but I was also so excited for my senior year to finally be here. I anticipated applying to graduate school, and I had the same fears that everyone in my class did – what do I do next year? It doesn’t seem real that that was only a year ago. Now, I’m finished with my thesis on O’Connor (and Julian! Let’s not forget her!), I have my Holy Cross diploma, and I purchased my British Airways flight to head over to London in the fall. I honestly cannot believe that things are moving this quickly.

(P.S. I got a new digital camera for graduation, so you can expect a whole lot more photos on this site that aren’t from a) my Blackberry or b) disposable cameras.)