Earlier this week, during an after-class stroll in the CFA, my friend turned to me and called the first semester of college a “liminal space.” I’d never heard the word “liminal” before. When I asked what it meant, she went on to explain that liminality refers to those ambiguous and empty spaces in the middle of two destinations, like airports or long hallways, when you feel like you’re floating in the in-between. As she spoke, I looked around at the stark brutalist buildings in the CFA, most of which I’ve never stepped foot inside. A rugby team, something I’d never actually seen before coming here, was warming up on the field next to us. The cardinal red on their shirts seemed to glow in the evening light. Behind them, the shadows were lengthening across Middletown, signaling the end of another day in this strange new world. I’ve been a Wesleyan student now for nearly a month and a half, and I couldn’t agree more with what my friend had said.

I spent the first eighteen years of my life living in a small town in southern Vermont, where everybody knows everybody and life moves in slow motion. Tucked between the Green Mountains, my town has one high school, one library, two grocery stores, and not an Uber or a Lyft within fifty miles. Its economic bread and butter is tourism from New York and Connecticut, and (despite our best efforts to establish a nightlife scene) New England guidebooks tend to describe it using words like “charming” and “quaint.” By eight p.m. on a Friday or a Saturday night, main street is dead silent. The most thrilling thing for young people to do at night is to drive their cars up the hill behind my old high school to talk, to share milkshakes from the diner, and to look out over the valley. Many of the students in my high school’s graduating class were people I had known since kindergarten. Even if they weren’t my best friend, I had attended their sixth grade birthday party or their dad had once coached my basketball team. Our social roots ran deep. It really was a wonderful place to grow up.

Of course, when the pandemic hit last year, everything in Vermont ground to a sickening halt. Those of us who had been regularly attending school or work were suddenly plunged into a liminal space, unsure if or when regular life would start up again. Confined to my bedroom and the mountain trails around my house, time took on a new, non-linear quality. I was growing out of my hometown, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go—that is, until the end of the college admission process. 

Upon arriving in the pouring rain at the start of September, I felt I had finally landed at the next destination: Wesleyan. I was ready to jump in and hungry to prove that I could do college “right”: start making all those lifelong friends everyone raves about, ace all my classes, get a job, go to every office hour and every extracurricular meeting, communicate regularly with my family, dance at every party, find a summer internship, join a band, and somehow still get an adequate amount of sleep. I wanted stories to tell my friends back home; I wanted my parents to have the confidence to tell their coworkers that I was “loving it” and “doing well.” Obviously, I was in for a rude awakening. Nothing in the first semester of college is that easy. After moving past the initial orientation befriend-everyone thrill, I started losing steam. Although I liked my new classmates, the school itself simply didn’t seem all that welcoming to a fresh wave of more than 900 first years. Nobody explained how the meal plan was supposed to work, I didn’t know how or where to buy textbooks, CAPS appointments were hard to come by, and somehow, the orientation program never included an official campus tour. Plus, without a common and regularly updated forum for student groups and events—sorry WesNest—it felt far too easy to miss out on opportunities to get involved. 

Moreover, it was slowly dawning on me that every person I met was either from New York City or Los Angeles, and it seemed as if they all already knew each other. Conversation topics in those first few weeks always circled back to private high schools I’d never heard of, or summer camp traditions I didn’t understand. I felt shut out of a culture I neither belonged to nor anticipated. This shift also included an unexpected element of wealth, displayed in a way I’d never seen before. Unlike the showy New England country club money I’ve grown accustomed to in Vermont, the Wesleyan populous is more casual about it. Eating out in Middletown is a regular weekday occurrence. Student style seems to hang somewhere between big city chic and Instagramable thrifted looks, where wealthy students parade as working-class while their big-budget sneaker silhouettes tell a different story. I’m well aware that Wesleyan made the switch to end need-blind admissions, and after spending some time here, I find myself wondering if the online financial aid statistics ring true. During a conversation with a friend participating in work-study, they walked me through their experience of trying to find an on-campus job. Although it was discussed at length in pre-orientation information sessions, the reality had not been so straightforward. Interviews were competitive, openings were few and far between, and as a result, they felt alone in the process, unable to find a single fellow student with work-study status to ask for help. It’s no secret that elite private institutions cater to the rich and affluent, but somehow I wasn’t expecting those rich and affluent to be quite so present in my everyday experience. At Wesleyan, wealth feels like the rule, not the exception. 

On the whole, my introduction to college was not at all what I had been dreaming of. It’s important to remember, however, that COVID-19 may hold responsibility for many of these disappointments. Considering the pandemic’s impact on university life, it’s amazing that we’ve been able to function normally at all. Only the seniors have ever experienced a full and ordinary Wesleyan school year. Hardly any students have been here long enough to feel established, let alone established enough to welcome newcomers. Therein lies the real problem: Wesleyan itself doesn’t seem to know what Wesleyan is really like. The entire campus is a liminal space right now, caught between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic culture. I have to keep reminding myself that everyone (including me) is trying their best. 

I don’t belong at home in Vermont anymore but I don’t quite belong at Wesleyan yet either. I’m still somewhere in the in-between space. I can’t say if it’s because the pandemic cut my goodbye short or simply because starting over is always a shock. Regardless, the transition certainly does not feel simple. In speaking with other members of the first-year class, this seems to be a shared sentiment. One blink and we went from juniors in high school to first years in college. After nearly two years of drifting back and forth between real life and quarantine isolation, we ended up here, in a flooded Butts room or a Bennet triple, trying to make sense of where all the time went. It’s easy to feel disoriented. 

But then the light hits just right through the car windows on my way home from Miller’s Pond, a friend pulls out their guitar to play me an original song or Usdan serves pumpkin pie ice cream, and I think: maybe this is all gonna be okay. The lows are low, but the highs are extraordinarily high. My impression of Wesleyan is nowhere near an entirely negative one. I’m surrounded by active and interested people, the polar opposite of my hometown, where trying was never cool. My peers really do want to join that dance group, run for the WSA, or volunteer as a doula. Professors are compassionate and engaging and make an effort to know each of their students personally. The open curriculum just about guarantees that the majority of students in any given class actually want to be there. On a larger scale, maybe this ambiguous student culture is a good thing; maybe the pandemic has opened a door for us to develop something totally new. There’s much more to come. It’s not a question of whether or not we’re doing college “right”—instead, we have to remind ourselves that it’s an achievement to simply be here “doing college” at all. I don’t know how long it will take for me to feel like I’ve truly left Vermont, passed through the liminal space, and arrived as a Wesleyan student, but that’s okay. We all deserve some room to breathe. 

Sophie Jager is a member of the Class of 2025 and can be reached at sjager@wesleyan.edu.