Graduation Reflection: Gratitude

It seems that I have graduated.

After transferring and dealing with college through a pandemic, at most points it honestly seemed like this day would never come. Now that it has, I cannot believe how quickly it went. Adults always like to tell you it’ll be the fastest four years of your life, and as usually tends to be true of those sort of cliches I ignored, it proved to be true.

For me, graduation day began with the baccalaureate Mass. The fact of the matter of graduation really had not still set in at that point. As I was sitting there, not really paying attention, I began looking around. The Mass itself was held on Villanova’s campus green, looking at Corr Hall, my favorite building on campus. As I looked around, I was struck with the first impression I had that things were over.

To open meetings, The Dead Poets’ Society, both mine and the one from the movie, reads a passage written by Henry David Thoreau, which goes as follows:

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately … I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life! To put to rout all that was not life … And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

This passage lives with me in a very special way, and is a mantra that I try my best to live by. There is no other mode of existence worth doing other than living deliberately, sucking out all of the marrow of life. To do otherwise would simply be to waste the one chance I have, but I often wonder whether I am succeeding.

Sitting on the campus green, looking my second home in memory-laden Corr Hall, however, I thought to myself nearly accidentally, “I can honestly say that I have sucked the marrow out of life here.” The moment after saw my first graduation tears.

The opportunities that I have come into at Villanova are absolutely boundless, and I am deeply aware of the necessity for both people and place to have achieved these goals. As such, I feel the need to try to express my thanks as specifically as reasonably possible to the many important pieces of my life, listed now in no particular order. Feel free to skip to the parts you’re in.

To N3L:

My very first college friends, I feel it is only appropriate to list you here first. Though I may have left William & Mary, I hope I adequately expressed to all of you how difficult you made that decision for me. Learning how to do college with you guys was some of the most fun I have ever had. From our orientation, to near constant cross-campus mischief, to sunny days on the Sunken Garden, I will never forget the one year I got to spend with you all. I sincerely wish I could have visited more often, but life unfortunately didn’t allow it.

I hope you believe me when I say I quite often reminisce about our Elmira busted party, moving James’s entire room into the lobby, taking shots with Tanner in the tunnels (and the tunnels adventures in general), and that time Jordan, Ben and I broke the exit sign only for Jonathan to somehow miss it. These and countless other memories were what made my freshman year something that, even though I may have left, I haven’t spent a moment of regret on and will be forever grateful for. It meant the world to me that you all FaceTime’d me into the final toast, and I want you all to know I consider you friends for life.

N3L forever and always.

To the Fairly Locals & Our Extended Family:

When I first came to Villanova, I was severely concerned with making friends. Transferring means that you have to figure out a way to acquaint yourself with friend groups that are already established, missing out on inside jokes from the previous year, and trying to make your way in without feeling like you’re forcing your friendship on people who don’t want it. Coming especially to a school where I already had friends from high school, I was genuinely concerned that I was always just going to be “Jason’s friend” or “Susannah’s friend” to everyone I met.

For a little while, of course, that is what it felt like, as Jason invited me to his events, Susannah hers, but nobody new ever invited me to theirs. That changed when, for the first time, I got a text from someone I didn’t know the previous year. Tom asked me to come play basketball with him and a few other guys I knew, and honestly I kind of just assumed that Jason had asked him to. When I got to Jake Nevin, however, Jason wasn’t even there, and Tom greeted me with a smile and asked me to join his team. This sounds like some grade school bullshit, I know, but that action meant the entire world to me, and still does.

From there on, I met a host of people that grew to be some of the greatest friends I’ve ever known. Even this year, in my final year at Villanova, I have continued to meet new people through you all that have become great friends in their own right. I still have no idea how exactly we all became friends. Business kids, engineers, future scientists, one future U.S. President/Supreme Court Justice, and whimsical arts kids; Eagles fans, Jets fans, Saints fans, Patriots fans, Vikings fans, and me, the worst sports fan ever; laptop stickers espousing anything from the founding fathers to anarchy to the latest of social justice causes; those who never shut the fuck up (myself included, sorry) to those I had to speak directly at to get to speak at all. This group of people makes absolutely no sense to exist as a unit, and yet it does, and what a profoundly special group it is for all of that.

I would never be the person I am today without you all, and I never would have had the experience I have had without you. From our first meetings in Trinity, Cupola, and Sullivan, to the real formation of our group in Gallen and St. Clare’s, and now finally the flourishing of our group that has occurred at 984, Arch, Canon, Friar, and Chapter, I have been with you through it all. We experienced the end of the world together, navigated social life in a pandemic together, figured out how much alcohol the human body is capable of processing (a lot, as it turns out), took on Nashville and Atlantic City without a single casualty, watched a few quarter life crises (or maybe that was just me), and shared many late nights together that allowed us really to become a family.

And yes, this group is family to me. It hasn’t come to that place without its drama, as is the case with any family, but the friendships I have with you all I sincerely believe will last a lifetime. You all have allowed me to become myself in ways I never could’ve imagined. You allowed me to explore my creative side and perform, something I never would have known how much I loved otherwise. You gave me the opportunity to learn to host, a skill that I hope I have gotten pretty good at by now. Having you all over always meant the world to me, and it always will; right as soon as I have a place to live, my door will perpetually be open to each and every one of you any time you want to come by. And I meant what I said in the beans ritual: we’d better all stay in touch, and I expect to convene at least once a year. Beerlympics wasn’t called semi-annual for nothing.

To The Villanovan:

The number one thing I needed to do when I came to Villanova was find a community to make myself a part of. I tried at William & Mary, and perhaps ironically given what I’m about to say, just found that everyone I met in various clubs I tried to join was just way too into their thing. It was prohibitive to me as a freshman just trying to dip my toes in, and I ultimately found that I was just unable to develop a sense of community there.

I went to my first Villanova involvement fair pretty unsure of what I even wanted to do. I put my email down at a few tables, talked to some club leaders, and made up my mind that I was going to try some things out. I’d never considered writing for a newspaper before then, and in fact as far as I remember I really only went up to The Villanovan’s table because my friend’s sister was the Editor-in-Chief at the time, and I felt like I should say hi. As with any good club leader, she of course made me put my email down, and ultimately I decided that I should go to the interest meeting.

Even still I wasn’t bought in, but the Opinion Section sounded like a good place to express my thoughts, which as a sophomore I of course believed were set in stone and absolutely correct. I joined and at once had a place where I could tell everyone my opinions without needing to do that whole awkward talking thing that I’m not very good at. Perfect.

I had absolutely no idea that that decision would prove to be one of the absolute best of my entire life. Through my time as Staff Writer, Opinion Editor, Co-Editor-in-Chief, and my very real and not at all made up position as Editor Emeritus, I have come to know some of the greatest people I have ever met, and a few of my absolute best friends.

When Cate and I first met, we had no clue what we were doing. There wasn’t exactly a plan in place, unless Cate had one I didn’t know about, and we slowly meandered our way through the process of interviewing seemingly endless candidates. We ultimately ended up finding this process very easy, though at the time I didn’t have the words to express why, but now I do. We skimmed through application after application, talked to potential editors for hours and hours, and landed more often than not at the conclusion that… well… they’re all only 18-21, about the same level of accomplished, and hell, so are we, so what the hell do we know anyways? The process ended up being chosen not on applications, but on people. I realize now that this was the best possible decision; you can train editors, but you can’t train people. That decision has made all the difference.

Our first horrifically awkward Zoom meetings always ended with Cate, Maddie, and I plotting on how to get you all to speak to each other, and ultimately we successfully lobbied OSI to let us back in person. Slowly but surely, after this everyone started to warm up, and oh boy did the tea start flowing there. I do not know what it was about Tuesday nights that made us all decide that we needed to dump lifetimes worth of trauma on each other, but somehow not only did we do that but we somehow also did it in the most hilarious fashion possible. You all are the funniest people I have ever met, I have truly never been in a groupchat like The Villanovan groupchats.

The friendships I have been able to make with each and every one of you are ones that I know I will cherish for the rest of my life. I cannot begin to start naming the memories this paper has blessed me with, but I do know that the basement of Corr Hall will forever hold a place in my heart, and all of you made that possible. Cate and I would not have been able to accomplish the goal of giving the paper its culture back without all of you buying into it the way you did. I joke sometimes that I got to hire all of my friends, but it never had to be that way. You could’ve all come into do your pages and left, but you chose to make our newspaper your home too, and that means the entire world to me.

To all of you, I extend the deepest thanks I am capable. You gave me a community to be a part of, you gave me opportunities I never imagined I could have, you made me think, you made me laugh, and you made me cry in the best possible ways. Having writer friends means I’ve been blessed with some amazing letters, and I hope this one holds a candle to what you all have written me. You are all so deeply special to me, and I intend on each of you being a friend for life.

To the Humanities Department (fellow students included):

I transferred into Villanova as a business student, pretty sure I’d become either a tax attorney or a CPA. While my transfer into VSB – as opposed to CLAS – was somewhat begrudging, at that time I felt that it was the right call even without the parental push, and never really considered anything different. Even if I’d stayed at W&M, I was pretty sure I was going to apply for a position in the business school and try to take a second major in Accounting.

I got here and found that – to put it as lightly as possible – VSB was the least academically fulfilling place on the entire planet for me. Professors didn’t really seem to care about students, students didn’t really seem to care about the classes, and everyone would just openly admit that they only cared about it insofar as they were there to get a job, hopefully at a ritzy firm on Wall Street. I tried to buy into this for a bit, but just found that something wasn’t right with all of it.

I know this isn’t a popular opinion for many, but personally, I thank God for the Villanova core curriculum. As a transfer, I was placed into a special cohort of ACS, Villanova’s version of the classic “let’s see if you know how to write” class. Our professor, Dr. Grubiak, introduced me to a mode of learning that I’d never really gotten to experience before. My thoughts, alongside those of my classmates, were asked for and carefully considered. A wide variety of texts were introduced, and were examined while still allowing room for our own experience and knowledge. Papers were assigned like normal, but I was encouraged to take risks that I wouldn’t have been allowed otherwise, and as such was allowed to really get at ideas I wanted to wrestle with, not simply respond to a prompt I didn’t care for.

This class atmosphere was intoxicating and intellectually stimulating, and ultimately most of us decided to take the second half of the course with Dr. Grubiak once again the following semester. At this point, I had gotten to know her fairly well, and knew that she was a professor in the vaguely named “Department of Humanities,” which sort of made no sense to me since I also knew she was an Architectural Historian. Humanities, as far as I knew, was just another name for the liberal arts, and I wasn’t exactly sure what that had to do with anything. Still, I knew that she was a good professor whose classes I enjoyed, and I knew that I needed to fulfill a “humanities” requirement for my VSB degree, so I took my first real humanities class, Modern Architecture and Religion in America.

This class was utterly fascinating, and the most amazing part was my job was mostly just to be fascinated by it. I got to take a genuine interest in something, and though the class obviously was graded, I found that just by actively engaging in the class as I wanted to anyway was nearly enough to be competent at discussing the material by itself. The atmosphere this promoted was one that students could quite genuinely just be students, not the academic sheep we’d all been trained to be from the ruthless grading structure we’d all become used to.

Eventually, knowing I enjoyed the atmosphere of the classes, Dr. Grubiak, alongside one of my closest friends and a humanities major at the time, Jason, I was convinced to try to at least minor in the humanities, and so, in my Junior year, I took on a minor. Even on Zoom, I continued to fall in love with the classes, students, and department, and by the Fall of Senior year I began to look into a major.

For a while, it looked as though I wouldn’t be able to complete a major. I simply didn’t have the room required to complete it and still graduate, or so I thought. To be a major meant that I would get to capstone my experience, to get to take a class with my fellow humanities majors to sum up the wonderful academic experience I’d had, and to write one final paper about a topic of my choosing. Though it sounds nerdy, I wanted to do that more than anything. I decided to send a Hail Mary email to the department chair explaining this and my desire to major, and was met with open arms.

This last semester, I was able to take two of the most amazing classes I took in my entire college experience. Even in my last semester at Villanova, I continued to meet some of the most heartfelt, genuine, and fun people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Even as a very late entrant, the majors greeted me with opened arms and treated me as one of their own. The department as a whole, students and professors both, felt like a family, and are a group I sincerely hope to continue to know long after college is over.

Coming from the cold and harsh atmosphere of VSB, where the questions of life are best answered by return on investment and who’s in your network, the humanities department of Villanova offered me the chance to know how to ask the right questions, to have an idea of where there answers might be, and afforded me the chance to get to know myself better in the process. I had been looking for exactly this, and was given that chance by this one of a kind department.

To each of you, my fellow students and professors whose presence in my life gave me the knowledge to truly live it, thank you.

To the Poets:

The Poets entered my life at quite a unique time. Early on in Junior year, reeling from heartbreak and left without a sense of identity, I stumbled my way into their room in St. Clare’s one night.

Jason, Alec, and Casey, the last of whom hates movies which makes this all the more wondrous, all decided to watch Dead Poets Society with me, as I had been asking for quite a while to watch it. I won’t give any spoilers away, but the gist is that a group of young men form a (drumroll please) Dead Poets Society, wherein they meet to recite poetry, and in the process learn to follow their passions and become more than themselves.

We saw the movie as a call to action, though nobody quite knew what to do with it. Suddenly, Jason leapt from his seat, told us all to get ready for a walk, and so we did. We left our phones behind, and went out into the night. Jason led us to a field I had never seen before out behind West Campus, and it was here that our first ever Villanova University Dead Poets Society meeting commenced. We each picked a poem and read it aloud to one another; mine was Invictus, by William Ernst Henley, one I still hold near to my heart to this day.

Deciding that wasn’t enough, we decided to partake in some mischief, wherein we ran around the Ithan Parking Garage looking for cars with a given state’s license plate until someone won. Ultimately, this resulted in us giving a Public Safety officer one of the weirdest explanations of his career, and we were sent on our way back home. The dominoes had been pushed, however, and from then on, Thursday nights consisted of meetings in St. Mary’s 109 where we recited poems we had written over the course of the past week to one another.

At a time in my life when I needed it most, DPS offered me an outlet. I learned to be creative, and to form my own struggles into a story. The sailor poems that I have posted on this blog came from this, and helped me to heal at a time when I thought perhaps I never would. I learned how pain can become something more, and can be given a new life in a story. I learned the talents of my close friends to write and recite their own work, and to deeply listen and respond to mine. I learned how beautiful friendships can be when there are no holds barred, and what it means to be a man without a faux-macho facade.

Those nights were beautiful, and were more deeply meaningful to me than I can begin to put into words. The tradition ultimately didn’t carry into senior year, and for that I am somewhat regretful. However, my experience at Villanova would not have been what it was without those nights. I miss them dearly now, but ultimately they helped to make me into a person who was more close to what I believe I am meant to be.

Without you, and the space you all gave me, I wouldn’t have gotten to know myself. Thank you all for giving me that, and for granting me the opportunity to get to know each of you in such a unique way. Love you forever.

To Mom and Dad:

Before any of this could come to fruition, there was the foundations that you laid for me. There are not words to express the gratitude I feel at the opportunities that you have given to me, and those which you have had to give up to afford me to have them.

Watching Max submit his deposit over Easter reminded me of the day I first submitted mine. After the arduous process of trying to pick the right school between all of the amazing options I had been given, the joy I got to experience with you in submitting my deposit to W&M was nothing short of amazing. The relief and excitement I felt was nothing short of amazing, although I’m not sure I really appreciated then what a gift I’d been given.

To go to W&M, I passed up on scholarships from two other tremendous schools to instead attend one that offered me nothing. Despite this, I never heard anything but support from you in my decision, and was simply asked to pick the school that seemed right for me. Looking back now, there is a tear in my eye at the thought of that opportunity, and the fact that I was even allowed not to consider money as a factor in deciding where to go. The privilege of that choice was lost on me then, but the immensity of it has come into my appreciation now.

Then, not long after arrival, it came time to break the news that, in fact, W&M was not the right school for me. Met with (perhaps) warranted suspicion from mom, and a thinly veiled overjoyed reaction from dad, this was the one you guys made me fight a bit for, and fair enough for that. My entire life, I was brought up to think Nova was the best place on earth, and I guess my choice to go elsewhere was because I had to see for myself. Ultimately, it was a game against Xavier in the pavilion that Susannah snuck me into that proved that to me. The sense of community I felt there was exactly what had been lacking in my experience at W&M. It seemed to me then that everyone felt proud to be a Villanovan, which wasn’t something I’d seen at W&M. It was then and there, January 2, 2019, that I decided I needed to transfer to Villanova.

Once more, you allowed me to make that decision, even though it costed you more. I want you to know that there has never been something in my entire life I have been more grateful for than that. Coming to Villanova was, plainly and simply, the best decision I have ever made. There has not been a single second I have spent at this school that I regretted. From the moment I arrived, I knew I had made exactly the right decision. Even when my “reason for coming here,” according to mom, dropped out of the picture, I didn’t spend a single second regretting the decision I had made.

Coming to Villanova has afforded me opportunities I could never have dreamed of, and I have you to thank for all of that. I will never forget the sacrifices you have made to put me in the position I am in, and even if it doesn’t look like it to you right now, I sincerely hope that some day I can show you that everything that you have given me was worth it.

Thank you, Mom and Dad. I love you, always.

Closing Notes:

Saying goodbye to Villanova is already one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. To be quite honest, in the four days that have followed graduation, I have been on the edge of panic attack for the majority of the time. I often don’t feel ready for the life that lies ahead of me, the life without school which is all I’ve ever known, the life without the people who have always been there and have always meant the world to me.

I often question my decision to move out to Montana, and in the face of leaving all of my friends behind here in five days, that decision is under more question than ever. However, I must believe it is the right decision. In the face of all of the reasons why not, I still made it, and I still believe that it was the right decision for me right now. I need the space to clear my head and to know what is the next step to make, and I believe this will give it to me.

Still, leaving Villanova is not and was never going to be easy. I’ve never been one for goodbyes, and this is my hardest yet. I have fallen in love with this place and the people who inhabit it, and the experience I have been afforded here even under a shortened time frame and a pandemic is one for which I will be eternally grateful. There are not enough words to ever even begin to express my thanks, but I hope this was a start. At the end of the day, it all comes down to this:

Thank you, Villanova, from the bottom of my heart.

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