From Freshman to Seniors, Two Whitworth Students Experience Freedom
By Stephanie Grace

Personal Essay

Black plastic trash bags and cardboard boxes stuffed with flip flops and running shoes littered the tiled floor of our bare dorm room. My new roommate Megan Crisp and I, with faces flushed from unloading our parents' sagging minivans, gazed around the room in both fear and delight at our new lives. Hanging out the second story window of our Baldwin room, the two of us posed sweetly for our first college picture together – and waved proudly to our sniffling parents below.

As we unpack, we are overwhelmed with excitement – we can take any course in the college catalog and can stay up as late as we want. With every picture frame and poster placed on a shelf or wall, we began to build freedom.

In the four years Megan and I have been at Whitworth, the face of our independence has changed dramatically. With every passing fall, our feelings of freedom are further from what we felt our first day at Whitworth. They have matured – and we have grown up.

The second year we moved the boxes again, across the lawn to Stewart, a dorm with brick walls, small rooms and cold showers. My parents didn't come with me this year; I have a boyfriend who helps me move in. Freedom is a gold Honda and an off-campus job.

A year later, Megan and I unpacked the bruised boxes into the upperclassmen's dorm, Boppell, and drove to the mall to buy cheap dishes and silverware. We glanced out our window, down to the lawn where Baldwin-Jenkins girls are chanting and singing. Freedom is a trip to Europe, a lonely Jan term, and another of our roommates wedding.

Suddenly, I am a senior moving into a five-bedroom duplex off-campus. I drop my overused bags and boxes in my green carpeted room and pause, realizing I will never move into another room for college. Megan is student teaching this year and has what we have affectionately termed a real job in the spring.

We graduate in May and life is waiting.

Today freedom is a landlord, a fiancé and a garbage payment. It also is graduate school and a decent job. Now instead of worrying about not having a car, I worry about how I am going to pay for the gas. In my new independence, I see only a faint shimmer of the freedom I felt with Megan our first day in Baldwin. I look at the photograph of Megan and me leaning out our window, and I sense the evolution of our independence. Our freedoms are different now. We are four years older, but as I look at our glowing faces, I grin. Our minds have been filled with Core and communication courses, but we are still two courageous girls hoping our freedoms have prepared us for a new phase of life.

Four years have gone by and it's life after college that is our independence - and I see us now, smiling and proudly waving the future into existence.