Photo by Aoife Paul Healy ‘26.
By Aoife Paul Healy ’26
Staff Writer
Mount Holyoke College is known for its friendly, welcoming student body and safe campus — but does our attitude towards “MoHome” prepare us properly for the real world? More specifically, does our approach to community let us build bad habits?
MHC is a small, tight-knit campus. Our school is the kind that thrives on building connections and positive relationships. There is a lot of unspoken trust between students, but it can be hard to explain the existence of that sentiment to anyone who isn’t part of the community. Still, it is evident in a few tangible ways, with one of the biggest examples being how we treat our possessions. Students leave their phones and OneCards on tables to mark them as “taken” before going to get food. Leaving a workspace in the library with the computer open and unlocked to grab something from the Frances Perk is commonplace. Our charging stations often have technology like iPhones, headphones and tablets propped up, charging neatly on a table while their owners work in the next room.
My thinking on this started last semester after I had seen a student leave a pair of AirPods Max — Apple headphones, which currently cost $549.00 on apple.com — at one of these charging stations before leaving the room. They didn’t return until two hours had passed! The fact that students feel safe enough to leave valuable pieces of technology lying about in public is certainly a testament to our sense of community trust on campus, but does that encourage an overly relaxed attitude on leaving personal items behind?
This is not an attempt to fearmonger about thefts on campus — MHC students are generally responsible regarding expensive technology being left behind. Our school lost and found Instagram page, @lostatmhc, has had several headphones, AirPods, AirPod cases and the like submitted to be returned to their original owners. Still, many other college campuses do not have this security, and it is not common to leave valuables behind, nor is it typical to report lost ones. While this is likely attributed to a variety of factors, such as campus size or accessibility of the public, I also believe some of it comes from our attitude about MHC being a “safe haven” of sorts.
Overall, it is important to keep in mind that while students can and should enjoy the comforts of MHC’s friendly, trustworthy community, this sense of security is not applicable everywhere, even on other college campuses. It may seem like an obvious sentiment when laid out plainly, but a reminder never hurts: Keep your valuables safe, and remember that this school’s approach to leaving things behind is a privilege we all can share — not the standard.