A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi

Most mornings I don’t get to hear my alarm song because I wake up ahead of the call to action. On the days that I do hear it, I let it ring, letting the singer’s gratitude bleed into my dorm room before I kick off the covers. Despite being quite the morning person, I still have a tendency to lay around for a few minutes before it finally kicks in that it’s time to head out.

Once I am fully awake however, it never fails that I have a sudden rush of energy. There’s an energy on campus that both excites and calms me. I feel it as I walk through the trails, when the sunlight passes through the trees at just the right moment, and even when I am walking home from a late night at Swem and see a line of deer gracefully entering the woods. My busiest day of the week consists of office hours in the admission building, an American religions class, early United States history, and finally early modern political theory (the least predictable of the bunch). After getting out of class, I usually grab a quick dinner with a friend before heading to my ESSENCE Women of Color meeting, after which I do some reading before heading to bed for the night.

At the end of every day, when I pause to take an inventory of my work, extracurricular responsibilities, and catch up with my similarly busy roommate, I am rewarded with an incredible sense of purpose in what I do here at William & Mary. No week is perfect, but every week is progress, and that, for me, is everything.

-Alex Yeumeni ’18