Chapter Eight: In Which I Have a Staring Contest with Cicero and Become Oriented Toward Veritas

This is Cicero. He is carved into the Memorial Chapel, which I walk past on my way from the Harvard Square T station through Harvard Campus and to the Divinity Corner where I work and take most of my classes at Andover Hall. We have staring contests. He usually wins. Demosthenes is hanging out on the far left of the photo, but he and I aren't as tight as me and Cicero.

Anyway, back to the start. On Thursday, August 25, I woke at 6:00 a.m. (oh my word, so early!), and I bused over to Cambridge. I walked through campus looking like a pro (because Spencer and I had already gotten lost and figured out our way around for my interview a week earlier). And then I checked in.

Now a normal day of Orientation, which lasted five days, consisted of eating breakfast (provided); mingling (difficult); attending information sessions (actually quite fun); eating lunch (provided); attending more information sessions, get-to-know-you functions, or small-group break out sessions; maybe attending a worship service; and heading home. And that is pretty much what I did for five days: exhausting but necessary and fun. Now that you know what it was that I did during Orientation, I'll give you my favorite highlights.

• Eating! I was so glad that they catered breakfast and lunch for us. First of all it was yummy, especially the fruit, and eating together was a natural way to sit together and meet new people with every meal. We also had a BBQ one of the days at Dean Hempton's house (Jewett House) and that was a blast. 
• Anytime the Dean spoke to us. Dean Hempton is the most darling older gentleman. He's funny, welcoming, he has a charming Glasgow accent, and he is insightful. Best Dean.
• Seeing how "green" HDS is. What I mean by that is their "green" or sustainability, earth-friendly initiatives. Every food gathering had multiple recycling bins, compost bins, and trash bins. Everything they gave us, including utensils, dishes, etc. was compostable! And these compost bins are in every bathroom as well. :) Yay for making a difference in small but measurable ways!
• The Course Information Sessions. These were a conglomerate of four-minute presentations by each professor regarding the course offerings this Fall term. It was very helpful, and the professors were super funny. So many personalities!
• Meeting with my adviser. My adviser is Matthew Potts, and he is so charming and calming. His advice is very helpful and put me at ease among the innumerable feelings of inadequacy, interloper-syndrome, and "what am I even doing!" that every incoming student feels.
• Conversations with fellow incoming students. I really think this is what made Orientation for me. I'm not so scared to start now that I can wave to my new friends or stop to chat on campus. I met Johnna, Jasmine, Rutdow, Heather, Eliot, Imogen, Joe, Grace, Waskito, Issac, Jenna, Kris, and many many more people. Our conversations were safe and authentic. No one was afraid to ask questions of each other, and I even spent multiple hours explaining doctrines and structures of the LDS Church. 
• Searching for cake during the beginning of the Bicentennial festivities, which marked the end of Orientation with the Bicentennial Convocation and HDS birthday cake! Eliot, Imogen, and I missed out on dessert earlier, so finally finding cake was a really big deal. :)

Left to right: Eliot, Imogen, Me, Rutdow.

So I made it through Orientation! I have my ID card, access to a $ 225 million-a-year library system, my complete guide to HDS for 2016-2017, a charlie card pass for the term, an HDS Bicentennial t-shirt, and friends! I am now a part of the HDS choir, the Creative Commons organization (we craft!), and other organizations that will gear up throughout the term.

In other news, Spencer shaved his beard. And yes, I made a collage of the process. He also helped take care of our neighbor's guinea pigs for a week while they were on vacation. They let us play with their board games, cook, and even use their car for emergencies. So nice! They just got back and paid us and surprised us with a bouquet of pink roses. :) Very lovely people. He's also been taking care of dinner and cleaning so that I can edit when I get home. (I have the last freelance project I'm trying to finish up.) Seriously, Spencer is one of the most actively supportive people I know.

Last Sunday, Spencer and I went to an LDS incoming student annual dinner. There are now seven students at HDS alone, as well as a few LDS professors and Ph.D. candidates across other schools. So we all got together and got to know one another. It was marvelous! Spencer and I couldn't have been more pleased with our experience and new group of LDS friends. Five of the master students are women a few of which are married, so Spencer was able to talk to Mike and Waldir, who also followed their wives across the country and had to find work. They were encouraging and understanding, and Waldir offered to be a reference for Spencer. Such great people!


I am now midway through my first week of classes! The first week of classes is called a shopping period, which means that I can go to as many classes as I want to assist me in deciding which classes to enroll in.

Miracle Moment! 
One of the most important classes to me is Love, Death, and Nothingness. It combines literature, women's experience, motherhood, personal essay, Japanese film, and pretty much everything I love in one cohesive class. Best thing ever! Ironically, I had originally been ambivalent about the course, not really understanding its content. So I had nixed it from my course shopping list. But my adviser happens to be the one teaching the course and mentioned it to me when he heard about my research interests. So I showed up to the first class. Over the course of the class, I realized that this was "it." This was the course that could somehow reach into my many random experiences that led up to my coming to HDS and synthesize them into a beautiful result, one that may even help me formulate my Ph.D. platform. To my chagrin, the feeling that this course might be one of the reasons I was supposed to come to HDS, was accompanied by the realization that the course capped at 15 students and 50 students showed up to "shop" the course. I was sitting among 50 students who wanted to take the course, my ambivalence turned to ardency, and now I might not be selected to take the course. We wrote a paragraph about why we wanted to take the course (I practically bore my soul. Embarrassing.), and we handed our papers to Matthew Potts. He promised to read them all that night and let us know by the next morning.

I spent all night compulsively checking my email. I couldn't tell Spencer what was going on, I was too stressed, too hopeful, too nervous. So I was silent on the issue. (I did tell Eliot, who I ran into on my walk to the bus stop. She said that she would send all her good thoughts my way.) The next morning, I checked my email: nothing. An hour later, I checked my email for another reason entirely, and there it was! I held my breath . . . I'd gotten in!!! He'd stretched the class to 22, saying he just couldn't cut anymore. And I got in! I ran to Spencer, and, amidst many kisses, I explained everything. (He had been curious about my compulsive email-checking.)

So everything has worked out so far. This process has been a bit stressful for me since I generally want to be ahead of the game, very prepared, and quite structured. But things have worked out.

First day of school outfit and customary picture.

So far, I've decided to audit a class called, Animated Spirituality: Japanese Religion in Anime, Manga, and Film. Besides my audited class, I will be taking four courses: Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion, Love, Death, and Nothingness, and Gender and Sexuality in Mormonism. The fourth class will be determined by the last half of shopping week. I've started work with the Office of Communications, I've performed with the choir once, singing a beautiful medley on flowers. And I've felt thoroughly at home among all the lovely people, the faith-promoting dialogue, and vocation-driven studies I've engaged with and in. I'm grateful to live in such a beautiful place, to have the opportunity to study on such a stunning campus and with so many stunning people and resources. I'm grateful that I have a job and that we have a plan for paying rent for the next few months so that Spencer has time to locate work. I'm grateful for Spencer's support and for all the support I'm finding from family and friends far and near, old and new. I'm grateful that there are people in the world willing to dedicate their lives to Veritas—to the search for an understanding of truth, especially to the end of helping humankind. I have been welcomed into that pursuit, and now I must "take courage on this new road" (Betty Friedan) because I feel that this is only the beginning.