Legacy

It has been a monumental summer thus far, in more ways than one—working on a team with thirteen other senior interviews has been an amazing experience. In the last six weeks, in the scores of interviews I’ve conducted, I look across at the nervous seventeen year old sitting adjacent to me and I see myself as I was four years prior.

It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago.

I see myself as I looked for the perfect college, the perfect idea, something straight out of a college look book. I see myself as I envisioned at eighteen, A+ papers and dark, crisp jeans. I see the best friends I imagined would magically appear but actually took months to find; the classes that inspired me and the lectures that bored me to tears. I see the last three years in a slide show, a brief glimpse of each picture illuminated briefly before it hurdles onward, into the present, into the future.

And then I see myself now, working with this inspiring team to bring in the next classes, to leave our legacy; the next generation of brilliant kids who will follow behind us as our own footprints and the impressions we have left here fade away.  And I remember that this is what brought me here, and this is why my life has been about the green and gold since my own college interview.

I am a part of a greater legacy, one that began with the signature of a king and a queen, with the passion of Thomas Jefferson and the ravages of the Civil War. I have walked this campus, so like an onion in its layers of history, each new archaeological dig unearthing centuries long past, knowing of the centuries yet to come. I see myself for what I am—a speck, a single brick in the legacy of this place. I see these rising high school seniors for who they are: the next generation, those who will carry the torch onward as we hand it to them.

I have never loved a place more. I have never worked harder, laughed harder, been more awed by my peers than I have on this campus. And I have never been more excited and afraid of what the future holds, as I look forward to the last first day of classes I will ever have. To some, William & Mary is just four years, a place to earn a slip of paper. For me, it has been more a part of who I am than anything else; it has been a privilege to be here, in this perfectly imperfect place, moving closer to adulthood one small step at a time.

And so to you, the Class of 2019—it is to you I give my love for this university. As you all prepare to begin your own college process, your own journeys, it is with you I leave my own legacy, and the legacies of the centuries before us. In each one of you I meet, in each evaluation I write, I see what you could bring, and I smile. I know the future of William & Mary will be in good hands.