Hello!
My name is Ian, and I can’t wait to begin working as a Marsh associate! This year, I will be a sophomore in the college of Arts and Sciences. While I have not yet decided what I want to study, my current interests are anthropology, neuroscience, or statistics. Languages also fascinate me, especially Ancient Greek and Latin. In my spare time, I enjoy playing piano, cooking, cleaning (as strange as that may sound), and taking long walks outside.
I come from the town of Brookline, and I’ve grown up near Boston for much of life. Despite this, when someone recently asked me “Where is home for you?”, I had to pause before answering. The friends I’ve met at BU and Comm. Ave have intertwined over the past year in a place that I can call my own. On the other hand, my family and the house I grew up in lies all of a half-hour away from campus. I feel fortunate and grateful to have these two places so close together. It’s comforting to know that my parents and younger sister are within walking distance of my dorm. The anxiety of separation from my family also didn’t weigh on me as much as I thought it would. Instead, however, the idea of home has begun to overlap between Brookline and BU.
One instance of this overlap was when I encountered a few friends from high school on my way to work last fall. Given that my workplace stood right next to the high school building, I should not have been so surprised. Even though I was happy to see them, the experience felt jarring. I had returned to the very same people I had said goodbye to the summer before. As much as I love them all, coming back to familiar faces so frequently made it very hard to let them go.
I’m still learning to reconcile the fact that my home life will probably not remain separate from my college life. It also won’t stay the same, since people grow up and move on. My home in Brookline isn’t something that can be easily walled off and forgotten, and it should not be clung a steady crutch that I need to rely on. We all carve out our own space to act independently in, but the places and people we come from remain with us.
There is a saying that home is where the hearth is. For me, that means that home is a place of warmth, of love, but also pain. After all, home can hurt as much as comfort. Even so, it nourishes an eternal flame that we carry within us, with a hope that this flame can sustain not only us, but those whom we love as well. Even though I still can’t answer where home is, I am comforted to know that I choose to carry some of it with me. I hope that in the upcoming year, it will grow in Marsh Chapel as well.