Hey besties.
Thank you for bearing with me over this brief intermission, as I gave myself a well deserved break after finals. More importantly, a break after Charleston Affair, which I needed several days to recover from. Just discovered what an open bar is last week.
I’m done with school maybe forever, already forgetting the days of the week, and having random bouts of anxiety when I see I haven’t deleted the time blocks on my Outlook Calendar and having to remind myself I actually don’t have to be anywhere at 12:45pm.
Naturally I’m writing this the night before to send to your inbox in the morning. So, *technically* tomorrow I will graduate from the College of Charleston with a degree in Arts Management, but as you’re reading this, today I will graduate from the College of Charleston with a degree in Arts Management. It feels really weird to type that out because for the entire last semester, I’ve been waiting for a giant clown shaped shoe to drop - like some sick joke that would prevent me from actually graduating. For example, graduating really was imminent on me passing Statistics 104 this semester. Yikes! I hope to never see another Binomial Distribution ever again.
Like most of my friends, I feel a weird mixture of being glad to be done and simultaneously wishing college would never end. Charleston is truly a magical place and I would not change anything that got me here, even as far back as elementary school. It’s strange to think that fifteen years of daily, very mundane choices got me to exactly this point.
In 2009, my family took our first vacation to Folly Beach, SC. I was seven years old. The two things I remember from this trip are eating at Taco Boy on Folly and watching shooting stars on the beach at night. I wished that one day I’d get to see Taylor Swift in concert, You Belong with Me was my favorite song. Of course, I still love Taylor and I fulfilled that wish, but I might take you to a different Mexican restaurant if you were visiting me.
When you’re seven the idea of choice is picking between Frosted Flakes or Cheerios, playing soccer or doing ballet. Maybe fifteen years ago I had subconsciously already made my mind up about wanting to come back to Charleston. Maybe when I was seven I knew who I wanted to become, or that I've just been the same all along.
Five years ago, in August of 2019, I walked into the Candlefish Store on Wentworth and King with a yellow tote bag from a campus tour. A salesperson approached me and told me how she had recently graduated and completed a degree in Arts Management. I wish I could remember her name and thank her because she opened up a pathway for me that I didn’t believe was possible before. I had toured a handful of colleges before CofC, and this was the first time something “clicked” for me. She put into words exactly what I wanted, to work behind the scenes for musicians, to plan concerts and festivals. It felt like a very random choice to step foot into Candlefish that day and that conversation made going to college seem exhilarating - something that up until then, I felt like I had to do. After that, I knew that coming to Charleston to study Arts Management was something I get to do.
Five years since that campus tour, and three days since my last shift at the Office of New Student Programs. As I began to wrap up my sophomore year, I figured that becoming an Orientation Intern was the best way to stick around for the summer. I called to schedule my interview on the very last day, at the very last hour - another choice that felt mundane, but became the most rewarding position I’ve held in college. Getting to work two summers of Orientation gave me the ability to speak in front of hundreds of students and their family members to excite them about coming to college and reassure them that they made a great choice. I feel immense gratitude for NSP, for every orientation intern I’ve spent the last two (sweaty) summers with, for the greatest boss I’ve ever had, Stephanie, and of course, Carly, Dr. Miley, and Dr. Fleming, who have all made every job to follow a lot less exciting. Yes, even as I transitioned out of my intern role into a front desk assistant, I found it exciting to work in an office and transfer phone calls. Sometimes the conversation will shift and I will speak to an eager parent calling with a 410 or 443 area code. I often wonder if they can hear me smiling on the other end of the line as I tell them that coming to Charleston was the best choice I made so far.
As my college career becomes a chapter that I will be closing today, I’m feeling especially grateful for all of those uninteresting choices that got me here. I’ve accomplished goals that I never deemed possible for myself, certainly not without the Arts Management Program Faculty, not without the staff at Charleston Music Hall, and not without my best friends, all whose encouragement and shared joy in my accomplishments have led me here. I am so excited for what’s to come and I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
