With two semesters between me and the conclusion of my time at Notre Dame, now more than ever I feel lost as to how I can make my senior year truly “great.” The concept of “great”-ness (not to be confused with greatness … I’m not shooting for perfection here) has plagued my entire summer and even these first few weeks of my senior year. Every first of the year is also a last: last first day of class, last first drummers’ circle, last first home football game (let’s not talk about that one).
As roughly 2,000 first-year students experienced this August, an introduction to Notre Dame can be a lot. So many life-changing, “core-memory” moments happen within a three-day stretch, and you’re supposed to have all this time to process.
Sometimes it feels as though I’m still recovering from the marathon of my Welcome Weekend way back in 2021. As I’ve navigated the last few weeks with a “new year, new me” mentality (will I actually have perfect attendance this time around?), I am transported back to my first few weeks here at Notre Dame three years ago, preparing to cultivate my college identity and live the hype I had only seen on Instagram.
My first weeks of senior year have brought a familiar Welcome Weekend-ness to life. I open my socials, and I see groups of people I have somewhat known for the past three years documenting some part of their senior year. Apartments in Irish Row, block parties at Irish Crossings, the Texas A&M game at College Station.
It feels bizarre. There is this familiar and unavoidable “hype” that senior year brings — I’m brought to this realization that the end feels exactly like the beginning. I’m witnessing this weird second round of Welcome Weekend and it all holds that air of “great”-ness that I’m still trying to find.
My camera roll during my time at Notre Dame has entirely surpassed the thousands, and if I actually counted how many times I’ve looked at my camera roll in the past three years, I unfortunately would not get very far. The usual protocol for photos in my life has been:
1) Take picture.
2) Upload to Instagram.
3) Forget about it until I see the inevitable “your iPhone is out of storage” notification that requires I skim through my photos to clear out what’s unnecessary.
Sometimes I grow melancholy over the fact that the moments I’ve documented within my time at Notre Dame are so forgettable and so centered in documenting how “great” my college experience has been. I’m not trying to say that college isn’t one of the greatest things that has ever happened to me, but I do wish former-me took pictures that she looked back on instead of pictures that sit dormant on her social media until a necessary feed clear out. Chasing the high of attending a “great” school, portraying a “great” social life, doing “great” in all ways did not necessarily paint the truest picture of how complicated college life has been for me and likely for everyone else.
A picture, in this case, is worth only the words you want to say.
I have so many pictures of my first weeks on campus ridiculously captioned with a transparent black bar and sans-serif font indicative of my now-defunct Snapchat. Unsurprisingly, the moments which evaded digital documentation are probably the ones I remember the best. At this point, I don’t remember the “insane” (the word “insane” is used very generously) dorm parties I attended or the random tailgates my friends and I thought we were so cool for being at. But I remember how beautiful a South Bend sunset can be. I think about how lucky I am for the life I have here on the daily.
It can prove difficult to find what made my time here so special. I know Notre Dame has shaped me in a meaningful way, but I don’t think a photo album in my camera roll titled “college” even begins to cover the best parts. Life can be amazing if you take a second to document without proper lighting or adjusted saturation. College is “great,” just do not define your terms for greatness based on whatever everyone else has defined it as.
