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Senior Reflection: Personal Perception

By William Schink ’15

I’m having a fight with Hamilton right now. Not one that is physical, legal or financial, but an emotional one. Hamilton, I am tired of you.

I see a friend of mine’s posts on Facebook about what is currently going on at Syracuse, and  I can recognize how lucky I am to be here compared to there. But that’s not an excuse.

I could make this a reflection about my current complaints about Hamilton when it comes to dining options for people with dietary restrictions, the ways in which the student government and its relationship to the administration fail the student body at large, my disparagement at the dismembering of my major (for matters of “curricular merit”) or how the Hamilton I applied to is no longer the Hamilton I am attending. The list goes on and on, but this is a senior reflection, and it is my duty as the author to pass on to you what I have learned at my time here at Hamilton and what my biggest takeaway is.

We love to talk about personal fulfillment and definement without truly understanding what that is (ironic as the motto of the College is “Know Thyself”). There is much talk and very little doing in terms of this motto in regard to defining our personality, individuality and our belief set, really key things that a liberal arts college should be about (Exceptions including introductory theater classes and the oft-repeated phrase of Professor Mark Cryer when he says to “make a choice”).

Hamilton is not the real world. While everyone says “hi,” it’s still a very cliquey college (possibly even more so in the past few years) in that people do have their groups and circles, and tend to stay within them, or at most only venture five or six feet outside (with a few exceptions, there will always be that incredibly charismatic person that most people adore).

There is a desire to fit in at Hamilton, to belong and of belonging, and so we create friend groups our first year, and those groups grow a bit and shift throughout the year. During sophomore year, these shrink a little bit, maybe you shift more into one circle than you do another. In your junior year you fall out of a friend circle or two, maybe more so if you go abroad (I didn’t, thank you very much, I had a lovely experience with a longtime family friend who very graciously took me along with his daughter and a student of his one of the summers before Hamilton. You shouldn’t judge people who don’t or can’t go abroad, how dare you, if you don’t judge people on that criteria though, good job).

Senior year is different for everyone. I know my friend group is smaller than ever, some people whom I used to call close friends pretty much never even contact me anymore. But you can’t let that bother you. Key to knowing yourself and becoming a “Working Adult Trying to Enter the Realworld” (or W.A.T.E.R.) is not letting your friends define you. You need to learn that it is not Hamilton that defines you, not your leadership roles in clubs or social organizations, not the people who rally against you, not your curly hair, not your depression, not your grades and not your family.Do not define yourself in terms of a Hamilton Student, at most you are a person attending Hamilton. Understand yourself in your own eyes, you are not one thing or have a single experience that makes up who and what you are. You are many places, many people and many thoughts and to let someone try and take that away from you or to dictate your identity for you is tantamount (for me at least) to being spiritually lobotomized.

Take advantage of your experience at Hamilton because this college has resources, people, professors and facilities to help you grow if you want to use them. Don’t let the atmosphere, the opinions or people use you. Take this as a time to outline yourself, and be the final draft of the person you want to be in this endless redrafting cycle of your life. That might sound very mushy, so feel free to write in a metaphor using cephalopods or crustaceans or a sea shanty.

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