5 — Thursday, September 12, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Homecoming: sharing our love for Lady Ann and U-M
Since my freshman year, I have been
working in a biochemistry lab on the
Medical Campus. It was a job I procured
out of peer, advisor and personal pressure
to do research in any way possible after a
significant academic pivot from pre-law
to pre-med during my first semester.
After doing away with math and
science, disavowing their application or
importance in my vastly superior world
of law, I had not taken a STEM class
since my junior year of high school and
successfully snuck around the reaches
of calculus and A.P. physics. Gone were
the days of numbers and lab partners and
calculators.
However, after a less-than-affirming
experience interning in a district court
and an exhilarating experience in an
emergency room, I realized that I was in
fact not going to be a lawyer, and I was
really meant to be a doctor. Back to the
drawing board, I found that I would need
the numbers and the lab partners and the
calculators.
Void of any university-level scientific
knowledge, I interviewed for a position
doing biochemical research before I had
even enrolled in general chemistry.
I was taken on as a volunteer, washing
dishes and organizing boxes, trying to get
some sort of grasp on what was going on
by watching the post-docs do their work.
I was blown away at their experiments,
bewildered by the concept of effectively
growing yeast cells with different
fluorescent
properties.
It
seemed
superhuman — I couldn’t understand it.
Everything went over my head, and I was
afraid that it was too late to make such a
monumental shift to pre-med.
Nevertheless, I stuck with it, as I
worked through an overloaded schedule
of introductory chemistry, biology and
calculus. I tried to understand more
from the lab, but it was still remarkably
challenging. The head of the lab had to
sit through my floundering attempts at
explaining what I thought was going on.
I stayed in Ann Arbor over my first
summer
to
continue
my
catch-up
work, and I continued working in the
laboratory. I was officially hired to
continue my work washing dishes and
organizing boxes, but now I could also
make a couple solutions. I knew about
molarity, more or less, and could put
together a sodium chloride solution.
I figured out how to use an autoclave
and how to make synthetic media for
bacterial growth, though I still didn’t
know how the cells could just grow like
that.
Sophomore year came around and I
was still working at the lab as I worked
at organic chemistry and neuroscience
courses. I began to understand more
about how biological molecules worked,
why carbon is so important, how cells
can talk to one another and why bacteria
can just grow like that. With the help of
patient mentors, I began to piece together
an enormous scientific puzzle with an
innumerable number of puzzle pieces.
My labwork became a constant parallel
to my coursework, a benchmark to check
my understanding and fill in gaps.
Over the past summer, I learned
how to grow yeast cells with different
fluorescent properties and how those
properties can be evaluated. The work
that once seemed superhuman now
made sense. It was tactile, and I could do
it myself.
Now, as a junior returning to the
lab this semester, I continue to have
revelations of the biochemistry that
once confounded me. I continue to piece
together the enormous scientific puzzle,
though there is still a great deal to learn
and a great deal to be confounded by.
Still, reflecting on my homecoming to the
laboratory each semester, I see what a
remarkable resource it has been over the
past three years — not only for learning
biochemistry and laboratory techniques,
but also because I can see my intellectual
growth in subjects of study that I had
once feared were beyond my reach.
Without a doubt, what I look
forward to the most while being
back in Lady Ann are game days.
Yes, it’s great to see all my friends
again. Yes, I love my rigorous
training curriculum even in my
senior year. Yes, the traffic on Huron
is as thrilling as ever. But, game days
as a student are just magical.
Our section — filled with Musical
Theater majors — on game days
is without a doubt my favorite.
Reliving those vibrant moments
of school spirit as everyone comes
together
before
the
crushing
atmosphere of winter isolation is a
sensation that I am convinced could
not be replicated anywhere else.
Of course, there’s the game day
garb. It always impresses me how
creative people get with their game
day outfits. I try to be as glam as
humanly possible. I wear costume
diamond drop earrings with a
bright yellow $20 fur coat. I top it off
with a bucket hat. The rest depends
on the temperature.
The actual victor of the game
is rarely the point of game days.
My friends and I subscribe to the
notion of the journey being more
important than the destination.
This is really only false when we are
playing against Michigan State or
Ohio State. In these situations, the
output is crucial to school morale.
I love game days. The happiest
I’ve been here is on game days. The
feeling of being a part of something
so big, joined together by one
common goal, is just downright
cool. Before I came to Michigan,
people told me that everyone up
here would brainwash me into
thinking that we had the greatest
school in the world. They were
completely right. We do have the
greatest school in the world. I’d
love for someone to try and tell me
otherwise.
NATALIE KASTNER
Daily Arts Writer
Ann Arbor is in the same state you left it
in — 68 degrees, sunny, students on lawns
and streets with frisbees and chairs. Red
Light Rotisserie got a new sign, but Campus
Corner remains intact. State Street still hosts
Noodles & Co., The Getup Vintage and its
beloved theater. The Diag got some new
stones.
But things are also very different.
No matter what, everyone tries during
homecoming to reestablish themselves
on campus (and demonstrate what good
summer’s done for them). This might
manifest in initiating a conversation you
wouldn’t have had last year, going up to that
professor you’ve gauged as cool after class or
telling that voice in your head that doesn’t
want booze at 10 in the morning “no.”
From an individualistic perspective,
there are incentives to plant new roots, but
there’s also just a general exuberance — a
zeitgeist really — that is Welcome Week at
the University. With everyone back in town
and no class, people feed off each other’s
energy and openness like no other time of
the year.
There are the nights in with those you
expect to get closest to — the new roommates.
Friends of friends you meet on a night out get
a warm hug. Strangers shout at you from
cars and approach you on streets, and you
reciprocate their forwardness. There are,
of course, the rituals — Festifall, football,
all-college BBQs. These are decades-old
traditions that are all intended to get the big
machine up and running again.
It’s unclear where the dividing line is
between these opening weeks and the rest
of the year, but you eventually feel when
they’re gone. For me, their departure is
signalled by my first late night spent in the
studio doing architecture work. When these
weeks’ charisma fades, you’re suddenly
left in a world only slightly different than
semesters past: an alternate reality where
summer, now in the past, is the only thing
that’s caused this environment and people
you’ve been acquainted with for years now
to feel new.
Sure, we’re left by circumstance in
new groups, but homecoming is really
a reintroduction to whatever life you’ve
started here in years prior. We’re the same
people as we were in the summer, but a
change of location and people as such is
certain to affect our ego.
As homecoming and reassimilation
comes to a close in Ann Arbor, where does it
leave you?
My return to science
DESIGN BY CHRISTINE JEGARL
ZACHARY M.S. WAARALA
Daily Arts Writer
That fleeting homecoming feel
COMMUNITY CULTURE SPECIAL EDITION
Games days: the
perfect welcome
I remember the first time I went home to
New Jersey for Thanksgiving freshman year. I
was so young, so breathless and I hadn’t ever
fallen in love — with a person, any midwestern
city or myself. If you told that baby faced
18-year-old whose dorm walls were covered in
light pink decorations what would become of
the next three years, she would first sob, and
then she would kiss your hands. I remember
accidentally referencing going back to school
as “going home” that first Thanksgiving, which
either put a dagger or planted a bed of flowers
in my mother’s chest — maybe a bit of both. But
that’s just it — it is home. Perhaps not so much
in address or birthright, but in sentiment.
Freshman year was the first time I stepped
foot into 420 Maynard St and walked into
the newsroom of the Daily, a place that will
forever hold my heart in its hands. It’s the early
evening I met my redheaded best friend, whom
I’ve never wanted to experience life or walk
into Panchero’s without ever since. It’s the year
I spent sitting across from my roommate on
pink and gold coordinated bed sheets recalling
tedium of our first classes and the terror
of placing trust in the hands of people you
only just met. At once, three years in my past
feels simultaneously like yesterday and one
thousand years ago.
Three years later, I arrived here in August
for a fourth and final time. As we pulled off the
exit for Ann Arbor, my best friend and I held
hands in the car and fought tears. We were
home again, one last time.
Life and Michigan circle around us in
fascinating ways. We realize that nothing, not
even a campus this large, is really so gigantic.
Everything gets smaller. We’ll know someone’s
hands and then we’ll unlearn them. We’ll walk
into a class to learn about stats, but walk away
learning about life. We learn that luck can be
very large and very small. We fall into things
for a reason — classes, mass meetings, people,
coffee dates. We fall out of things for very
similar reasons. The gift of Michigan is that
every closed door bears something new right
behind the next, right around the corner. This
campus has broken my heart twice, afforded
me the ability to travel to South Africa to study
theatre, fractured and mended me. It has told
me that my purpose on this earth is to be a
writer; it has given me opportunities and late-
night pizza.
This place, for me, is home. It is traveling
across the world and meeting a Michigan
graduate at a wine tasting, it is the “Go Blue!”
we will utter to strangers for eternity, it is
8 a.m. lectures in ten degree weather, it is
the memories of our decrepit senior houses,
Greenwood Avenue, flights to DTW and
strangers who became soulmates. And because
home can be a sentiment, an emotion, a tickle in
your chest as you walk down familiar streets —
we’ll always have this shimmering zip code to
come back to, for forever.
ELI RALLO
Daily Arts Writer
Reflections on a final homecoming:
A senior’s last first embrace of A2
A very Sussman homecoming
Homecoming is a unique situation — a
strange amalgamation of emotions that
are unrivaled, in my opinion, by any other
experience I’ve had in college.
Homecoming, at least in the beginning
stages, is boring, overwhelming and
sometimes slightly bittersweet. It means
that the summer is over, that the time for
experimenting with jobs and side projects
is over. It means reconnecting with friends
that I haven’t seen in months, both people
that I’ve tried to keep in touch with and
people that I haven’t bothered to.
It means running into people around
campus that I haven’t thought about since
freshman year. It means hearing about
hundreds of summer jobs and trying to
act interested in the inevitable banality of
unpaid internships.
Homecoming can also be quite exciting.
It’s an opportunity to meet new people and
try new things. It involves mass meetings
and hoards of Google calendar events. It
involves constant internal deliberation:
Could I fit that club in my schedule? If I
tried that activity would it ruin these other
activities? Would I be okay dropping this
activity in favor of that activity?
Almost by default, this becomes an
annual referendum on my career goals.
I’m forced to consider whether my classes
match my career goals and whether my
extracurricular activities provide the
much needed supplements in today’s
increasingly
competitive
job
market.
I’m forced to question whether my
assumptions from last year are still true in
this regard.
And once I begin to develop a regular
schedule,
homecoming
can
become
disorienting. It forces me to rediscover the
group of friends that I’ll end up spending
the majority of my time with outside
of class. Despite what I may think, I’ve
changed over the summer. My friends
have changed over the summer. Almost
inevitably, I’ll be closer to some people than
I was last year and further from others.
But as homecoming winds down, as I
overcome my mid-college crisis and settle
into a normal routine, the thing that stands
out most in my mind is the excitement
in the air all around Ann Arbor. It’s the
excitement of over 44,000 students coming
together again after four months apart.
It’s
something
that
I’ve
never
experienced before and I’ll probably
never experience again: a town filled with
44,000 people just like me, with 44,000
people around my age, all of whom live in
the same town for the same reason.
I can’t think of anything more exciting
than that. And as the many emotions of
homecoming recede into the distance,
it is this sense of opportunity that sticks
with me — that feeling of returning to and
rejoining a community that I am meant to
be in. It’s the feeling of coming home.
HOMECOMING SPECIAL EDITION
BEN VASSAR
Daily Arts Writer
SAMMY SUSSMAN
Daily Arts Writer
Home can be a
sentiment, an emotion,
a tickle in your chest