Blast from the Past I
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
I was looking at my personal website from college (remember those?) and couldn’t resist…
Freshman Year Sponsor Group:
Great theory. Flawed execution.
Pomona puts all incoming freshmen into sponsor groups led by two sophomores. Each group lives in one hallway and does a lot of bonding activities in the beginning of the year. The idea is to cultivate a family-like atmosphere and network of social support for the year. Dating within sponsor groups (“sponcest”) was discouraged.
The head sponsors put the groups together and match up roommates. They relied solely on the information provided on our housing forms filled out over the summer. There was a list of dorm-relevant attributes that we had to rank on a scale of importance, e.g. my roommate’s cleanliness, the hall’s use of drugs or alcohol, how much you care about studying.
I didn’t put very helpful info – more about who I was rather than the type of roommate or room I wanted. I remember writing about my interests in culture and that my favorite music was “new age.” (People who asked for singles or wrote “I need my space” got their own rooms. Lucky.)
I ended up with a really bad roommate. She was inconsiderate, loud, and (the worst) an early riser. She embarrassed me in front of everyone, saying, “Don’t be so lazy. Take a shower.” She had a guy sleep over without advance warning. She bragged about her grades. Anyway, I won’t point out who she was.
This picture is from the end-of-year sponsor group dinner where the sponsors brought everyone’s housing forms and read them out loud. We had to guess who was who based on the form’s contents. My group knew me as soon as the sponsor read, “I am afraid of being left out.” As for clues on what possessed the head sponsors to put me and my roommate together, the only similarities I heard were: we both wrote we were “sensitive” and failed specifically to describe our ideal living mate.
My remaining years more than made up for it. I had awesome roommates/suitemates for the rest of college.
Nothing to do with your post but I read your tags. Navel gazing????
navel-gazing
n. Slang.
Excessive introspection, self-absorption, or concentration on a single issue.
(I’m pretty good at that. =P)
Guess I’m out of touch with culture. I’ve never even heard of the phrase, but I shall use it now. I should use it in an email to my boss. She’s 60+yo and uses “cool” all the time. How cool would I be?
I’ve only heard someone refer to it once, and it was at a seminar at a church retreat about how to be “wise.” The speaker said if we focus on ourselves too much, we just end up looking at our navels. I don’t know how I remembered the correct phrase – must have read it somewhere.
Page 1 of 1 pages