When 2016 starts in January, it will be the first time in recent memory where I won’t think of the year in terms of spring and fall semester. It’s going to be a consequential year for multiple reasons; it’s going to be a consequential year for me.
Staring at adulthood feels pretty surreal while you’re trying to process four of some of the most formative years of your life, in a place that’s gradually become a safe constant and a community of which you’ve become a part.
But before I’m no longer an undergraduate, I have to say this to you, IU: thanks.
Here’s to you for being a microcosm of the world. When you go to a school of this caliber everyday, it’s easy to forget not every university can do what ours does on a regular basis. Thank you to the institution, the departments, the faculty.
Thank you to Bloomington for being a beacon of progress in a state so often lacking it. It’s because of the people of Bloomington — many of whom are brought here because of the University — that the city is so culturally open. And it is in this openness that I’ve been able to be the most honest version of myself, which is more than I could say growing up on the east side of Indianapolis.
Thanks to Collins LLC for making my freshman year unforgettable. Not only in making my time there feel like I was living in a smaller version of Hogwarts Castle — with its correspondingly ornate dining hall buffet — but more so for helping me understand the value of authenticity.
Here’s to the greek system, for personally teaching me about the intersection of class, race, gender and privilege. It’s funny to think just a couple of years ago how oblivious I might have been to a stratified ecosystem on campus that reflects the real one outside IU’s gates — and the need to continually challenge both.
Thank you to Student Life and Learning for giving me a shot, my first job and skills I’d later apply interning in Washington, D.C. Thank you to all the forces that be for allowing me to have an impossibly perfect internship that, by extension, gave me the insight into how the big boys and girls play in the District.
Thank you so much to my friends and family these last four years for genuinely shaping — in countless ways — who I’ve become and how I see the world.
And of course, thank you to the Indiana Daily Student. It’s through this platform that I made my voice heard (as can attest the people in positions of power I pissed off throughout the years).
But more importantly, it’s through this platform that I found it.
None of this could have happened without you, IU. Thanks.
edsalas@indiana.edu
