Vassar College: Off the Record - College Prowler - Softcover

You re the kind of girl who hides out in a sunny corner of the library to write her papers. The kind who will pass up almost anything for a good conversation, and who can often be found asleep on a couch with a book that s just about to fall off her lap. You re ambitious, shy, sensitive, and honest. You re a varsity rower, and yes, you have some pretty impressive muscles.

You re entering your third year at Vassar, a year that you will spend in London to continue to study Philosophy at a university there for your junior year abroad. You re about as ready as a fish out of water to jump into the cold water of a new city. But you re also scared in the way that fear rises out of a greater, ineffable anxiety, scared of leaving the place that you just wrote an entire book about, and more notably, of leaving behind the self who lives there.

You d like to thank several individuals. The list includes: your parents, Grace (Vassar Class of 72) and Phil, who have sacrificed the better part of their lives to raise you with so much love in a quiet suburb in New Jersey, and have never ceased to challenge you emotionally and intellectually; your brother Josh, for his wonderful humor and patience; your childhood friends, Marian and Jenny, for still being the three musketeers; your friend Sarah, for her acceptance, strength and not-to-be-matched personality; your roommates, Laura and Lila, who quite more than survived the freshmen triple the three of you shared; the Vassar crew team and coaches Mike and Kelly, for letting you know that there isn t anything more worth getting up for than playing around in boats; your 10 freshmen fellowees, a most inspiring, crazy and loving group of hall mates; Liz, Annie and Eliza, for letting you laugh and cry more than you have ever known; Jason Mraz, for his music and poetry, your professors, for showing you how much you do not know, the Youth RNC Welcoming Committee, for organizing one of the best youth turnouts for the RNC protests and for beginning your career as a social and political activist; everyone at College Prowler, for actually publishing this; and Vassar, for giving you more than something to write about.

All these people and places complete you and show you your holes. You love them in ways that you ve tried to figure out for the last 20 years, and hope to continue figuring out for the next 20.

Having completed two years of your ever-inspiring liberal arts education, you have exploded into a thousand birds that you just wish would fly in formation so that you could know where they were going. You d like to say that you ll be a writer always, but that sounds about as funny as saying that you ll always love words. What is safe to bet on is that you will always be someone, caught in a moment, trying to figure out what exactly to say.

Rachel Falcone
rachelfalcone@collegeprowler.com

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