Unlike most high schools, college offers the opportunity to meet people from all over the world. Sharing stories about one’s hometown and learning about others’ often conjures up interesting, and usually meaningful discussions. My roommate and I love trading stories about our hometowns. She tells me about the New York subway system and I tell her tales of the foggy Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. 

The website Hometown provides a place for these types of exchanges, but through an online platform. Founded by Zoe Reifel ’21, the site describes itself as a place where college students can submit stories, descriptions, and photographs of their hometowns for the whole world to see. 

“Zoe found herself wishing she could visit every city with a twenty-something local as her guide, so she enlisted the help of her friend Matt [Querdasi ’21] and created Hometown, a space for college students to compile their favorite locations,” the website reads.

In an interview with The Argus, Reifel elaborated on the website’s description, explaining the mission of the site.

“Hometown is a platform for college students to share their favorite spots from where they grew up,” Reifel said. “And the ultimate goal of the platform is to first of all, be a fun read, but also, if you’re looking to travel and you want to know where the local spots are, it’s a great tool for that.” 

The site’s homepage also gives a preview of each submission, noting the writer and city for each piece and displaying a picture of the author in their hometown. While featured hometowns vary from Mumbai, India, to Providence, R.I., to Seattle, Wash., the grounding principle is the same–students have an opportunity to share their favorite places and parts about where they grew up. 

Reifel, who is originally from Santa Barbara, was inspired to create the project after visiting her college friends’ hometowns, especially Park Slope, Brooklyn, where fellow Hometown team member Hannah Berman ’21 lives. 

“Fall break of freshman year, Hannah took me to New York, where she’s from, and showed me all of her wonderful little spots that she had these emotional connections to,” Reifel said. “I just found it to be a really incredible experience and wanted to recreate that in a more public space.” 

Reifel has been working on Hometown since her sophomore year of college, but because she lacked experience in website design, she recruited Querdasi over the summer to help create the site, making her idea become a reality. 

“It was a lot of back and forth,” Querdasi said. “It was a lot of working with Zoe, from a design standpoint, seeing what she wanted and then what I could actually do at the time.”

The Hometown team also includes Lia Di Bitonto ’21, who helps with the website’s graphics and illustration, and Berman, who edits submissions, promotes the project, and works to find new writers to submit to the site. 

As one may expect with an up-and-coming project, outreach is one of the Hometown team’s primary concerns at the moment. 

“Right now I would say our biggest challenge is driving up traffic to the site and getting new submissions,” Reifel said. “Also, trying to branch outside of students from Wesleyan into students from other colleges and also outside of the U.S..” 

The Hometown team has been primarily relying on social media to promote their site and encourage people to submit to it. 

“Recently we’ve started trying to build up a social media presence,” Berman elaborated. “We have an Instagram account now and have been trying to promote the content and we’ve gotten more people interested in the site by doing that.”

The team is not only looking for written submissions, but other forms of media as well, such as photography, as the team recognizes the value of both the written and visual components of the site. 

“It’s something that’s really, I think, fun to read, but also something that’s just generally fun to look at,” Reifel remarked. “You can really get a person’s perspective from these photos that they’ve taken and, and the places they’ve chosen.”

Henry Lin-David ’21 appreciated the opportunity to write and submit a piece about his hometown of Boston, Massachusetts. 

“I think it’s cool for people to write in a more casual setting, obviously it’s published, but it’s nice to be able to incorporate your own voice into your writing,” Lin-David said. “I had noticed people doing that in the articles I read previously and I think that made the writing experience in general, just very enjoyable.”

 

Grace Kuth can be reached at gkuth@wesleyan.edu.