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

