BY APRIL KEPLER ’21
Mount Holyoke was my top choice, so when I initially received my acceptance email from Mount Holyoke, I was ecstatic. Mount Holyoke was everything I wanted in a college. But when the physical acceptance letter came in the mail, my excitement quickly turned to fear. I was accepted for spring admission, instead of the fall. This notion terrified me. My head started spinning with all the questions and confusion every Springie inevitably goes through. Was I not good enough? Did I not turn my application in early enough? What the hell am I going to do for a semester? These questions spun inside of my head over and over again.
My parents began contacting the provided admissions emails and phone numbers with an indignant fervor generally reserved for Little League games. The responses we received provided little comfort, citing that often the admissions team looks for people who “demonstrated independence, initiative, motivation and passion” and “that might enjoy the option to do something different before entering college.” This practice is not unique to Mount Holyoke. After a search through the admissions information on all Five Colleges’ websites, however, I found that Mount Holyoke is the only college in which spring entrance is compulsory.
Spring admission is often overlooked in the promotional literature, leaving adults in your life as confused and clueless as you are. Once you are an admitted student, Mount Holyoke creates a Facebook group for each individual class. In our case, this is where we began to find that we were not alone. Springies were reaching out to see how many of us there were, or hoping that someone knew more than they did.
Then one day, someone decided to create a separate community Facebook group for the Springies to be able to communicate, especially as fall grew closer. Once people began to find the group, people were pouring in from everywhere. But even so, the messages were the same: “Do you know what you’re doing in the fall?” No one had any idea. This was true for most of the questions people asked. “Did any of you specifically apply for spring?” No, we had applied for fall with everyone else. Most often, “Does anyone know why we’re going in the spring?” Knowing we had the same thoughts, questions and feelings reassured us that we weren’t alone and finally allowed us to breathe. We continued to forge a community out of the unknown, as emails from the Admissions office were rare and the chance of us remembering the due dates for important forms were slim.
With the changing of the season, our conversations bemoaned all of the questions and pitying looks from people wondering why we hadn’t gone off to college like everyone else, and having to explain that it was not a negative thing. A part of me hoped that I would end up believing what I repeated over and over again to everyone else. According to our class deans, our orientation was going to be as identical as possible to the one in the fall, with one big caveat — we missed convocation, the most important part of orientation. As much time as we had spent thinking about all of the things we would miss, all of that fell away when we stepped on campus. The first day we ran around trying to match Facebook profiles to faces and meeting everyone who we hadn’t had the chance to connect with before.
The night we watched Dirty Dancing was the moment where I felt like I truly belonged to the Mount Holyoke community. I felt carefree, and truly happy with a nearly 30-person group I had known for less than 72 hours. We were shouting, wolf-whistling and cheering on every moment with reckless abandon (or at least more abandon than we knew was generally appropriate). We all came out of that movie giggling, giddy and bonded in this essential Mount Holyoke tradition of shared sexual frustration over Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey.
Being a Springie is difficult, and it brings many insecurities to the forefront of an already emotionally charged transition. In many ways, it feels completely converse to the Mount Holyoke doctrine of cultivating confidence and sense of worth, being made to feel like a second-class citizen or an afterthought. However, the bonds you form come January make the experience of transitioning into college a little bit easier.