By Anastasia Brown · Community Editor
Now that I am well over halfway through my “college experience,” I have begun to get self-reflective.
Am I spending my time wisely and doing all the things I always expected of myself when I was in high school, dreaming about the mythologized college years?
In many ways, yes. I am writing for the campus newspaper (something I believed would be tremendously glamorous when I was young — and it definitely is! Everyone should write for The Collegian!), I have wonderful friends who live on my hall and sometimes we stay up late to watch movies and make ramen, like the college girls in TV shows.
But in other ways, my time in college has morphed in unexpected directions. I have been challenged in many ways to think less about my “college experience” (the résumé builders and Instagram-worthy spring break trips) and more about the community in which God has placed me for four years and the ways in which I can serve to build it up.
“Community” is probably one of the top five words used in campus conversations (it doesn’t help that I edit the Community pages of The Collegian!), but I think it is the defining characteristic that makes the Grove City College experience special.
Community is demonstrated so clearly by the professors at our school. I never expected when I first arrived at college that so many of my professors would be welcoming students into their homes for meals or afternoons of conversations. I even went stargazing with a professor and her two little boys last spring. The openness of our faculty to share their lives with students is remarkable.
The community modeled by our professors is mirrored by the community students are building in a thousand different ways each day. Students are committed to self-sacrificial community-building — you see it in how many robust campus organizations exist on campus for a myriad of different causes. I even see it in Greek life — these groups certainly build community internally, but they also are often the initiators for some of the campus’s most-loved events and traditions.
So much of the labor done in a day by the typical Grover-achiever, in my experience, is rooted in a love of people and not résumés.
What’s more, community is not just formed by events — I walk down my hall and am impressed by how many students leave their doors open, hoping someone will drop by.
It is humorous but endearing that many of us, when we want to go out and see friends, go and sit in the library until someone drops by and joins our table. Even our habit of leaving phones and backpacks to mark our spots in the cafeterias and SAC demonstrates our confidence in the community we have built here.
As Christians, we see the community of local churches as holding special value. I’ve grown up as a pastor’s kid, so maybe church involvement came too easily to me — it was just the thing that my family did. But arriving at school and seeing so many of my peers committing to finding a church and then taking initiative to find ways to serve (through worship, volunteering in the nursery or serving at potlucks) has been inspiring to me.
Some friends who live in the apartments recently coordinated a post-church tea party for the little girls of their church. Looking at the photos from that afternoon made me smile — and reflect on the specialness of a college campus that can facilitate that broader community-building.
While studying abroad in Oxford last semester, I was introduced to the term “town and gown” — the historic disconnect (and even festering resentment) between college campuses and college towns.
Colleges too frequently build community on their direct campus while sapping their broader communities of resources and providing very little return value.
May that not be so of us! President Lingo has launched a service project initiative for the fall, as RAs and members of the Orientation Board welcome the incoming class of freshmen.
The class of 2030 will be getting out in our surrounding community in their first weeks on campus — I pray this can help continue to expand our vision of community and service on a larger scale than our immediate campus.
Community at all these levels — between students and faculty, in local churches and in the rest of the Grove City area — is distinctively strong. I hope this is something we continue to strive for, because community can never be held on pause.
It takes consistent, intentional effort and self-sacrifice — but it is worth it.
