This past weekend I had the amazing chance to travel to Wellesley College with a handful of other Bryn Mawr student leaders for the Seven Sisters conference. After some frantic e-mailing and a meeting that was bookended by videos of tiny hamsters eating burritos, we took off on Friday morning for a roughly six hour road trip to Massachusetts.

Wellesley has a student body that is a little more than twice Bryn Mawr’s, and the campus reflected that. Not only is the space stunning (especially with the leaves turning a million different colors), but it’s also huge. Well…comparatively. It’s not Rutgers huge, but it did take a little getting used to. Stay tuned for pictures of our adventuring! We definitely took some amazing group shots that belong in the admissions materials.

On Saturday morning, I attended a workshop on self-care for student leaders. It was incredible- informative, validating, happy. The facilitator talked a lot about the different kinds of self-care, and about going easy on ourselves when we have to say no. More than the maintenance kinds of things (eat, sleep, drink water), this was really specifically geared toward productive changes and healthy ways to deal with stress when it inevitably happens. There was also some focus on harm reduction, which I am a huge fan of generally. I got a lot out of it, and I’m excited to share the things I learned there in my community at Bryn Mawr.

The afternoon breakout sessions were split up by leadership roles, so I was with other “Campus Resource Positions.” Bryn Mawr was unique among the other colleges in that we brought community members (after an application process), rather than just folks on the E-Board. In a stroke of weird Mawrtyr luck, both of the community members (myself included) are above-average involved in SGA, so it worked well for the breakouts. We talked a lot about the Honor Code, and how it works and what confrontation looks like- students from the other colleges were blown away by how much control we have on campus, and the things that students are responsible for without faculty or administration oversight. It was a beautiful experience to explain personal responsibility and buy-in at Bryn Mawr, and have people from other colleges say that they might want to model new policies based around those ideas. We also found a lot of common ground- most of the other colleges have also had racism at the forefront of their campus conversations recently, and it felt useful to be able to talk about those issues and incidents with students from colleges that have similar environments to ours.

I also got to speak with an Ada Comstock Scholar from Smith! Ada’s are the Smith version of McBrides- really similar, except that there are so many more of them on their campus. Smith isn’t that much larger than the Mawr, but they currently have 120 Ada’s on campus! We talked about our struggles with representation and legacy, finances and community support, and I felt like I was talking to a kindred spirit. It was truly lovely to be able to bond in that way with someone who understood the very specific needs of the non-traditional student community.

I’m really excited to be able to move forward from this weekend and use the things I learned, and the connections I made, to create a stronger connection between the Seven Sisters, and on our campus as well. It felt like a real gift to be able to spend the weekend with a bunch of other hyper-involved, passionate, committed students who are working as hard as they can to make their communities better.