Dan Grantham
As much as my editorship at the Voice has consisted of downtrodden criticisms of the College’s Administration, tongue-in-cheek critiques of Wooster’s Greek community and pessimistic reviews of the Obama Administration, I swear I am really not all doom-and-gloom. Now that I am leaving Wooster, I can say that I have feel that coming here was the best decision I have my thus far in my short life. I never thought I could find such sustained joy, but I found it here. But this of course makes leaving Wooster one of the toughest things I will ever have to do.
Taking stock of my Wooster memories, it still seems hard to believe that I have been here for most of the past four years, including one awful summer. Unlike that summer, most of the time I spent at the College of Wooster was spent working, laughing, talking, drinking or partying with the type of friends 14-year-old Dan believed to exist only on television. And though I remain shy to a fault, Wooster made me confident in who I am, who I am not, and convinced me that I am actually not such an awful human being after all.
That is because Wooster students are smart, caring, funny and creative people who do not spend their days congratulating themselves for their own greatness. Unlike the angst-ridden, haughty students I have, on occasion, met at other schools like Kenyon or Oberlin, Wooster students have a real sense of the world in which they are in. We think tangibly, pragmatically and equitably. Sure, it’s never that perfect, but it was here that I first found a group of peers I could hold in high esteem and who, more importantly, respected me and my own eccentricities.
As such, I will miss everything about this place long after I have left — even past the point when my Wooster bill is finally paid off. I will miss the way the four seasons changed the beauty of campus. I will miss walking into Kenarden everyday. I will miss glory edging and singing the wrong lyrics of songs. I will miss going to class and I will miss running out of Flex Dollars before mid-terms. But most of all, I will miss all of you — my friends, my professors, the people who feed me and take care of me. I am leaving Wooster happy I came, but that makes leaving all the more difficult.
Wooster, je t’aime.