Dear Senior Lily,
I hope that you’re having a drastically different end to this last year than I’m having right now. As you can probably remember, our first year ended very abruptly due to the COVID-19 outbreak across the world. This caused a lot of chaos for everyone at Longwood, as this sent us home, basically forced everyone into an online university, and left the graduating class without their regularly scheduled graduation ceremony. Well, I hope that is not happening again by the time you are reading this. I anticipate that the COVID-19 situation will be resolved and we will be ready to have our ceremony in front of my current favorite building/dorm/home, Wheeler Hall (hopefully, I really don’t want to have all of this madness still going on three years from now).
At this point, I am finishing my first year on the dean’s list, involved on campus, and eager to return in August to be an honors mentor for the retreat. I hope by this point you have become more involved on campus in various organizations that interest you and make you step out of our comfort zone as well as kept your grades high for applying to graduate school. I also hope that you have had the chance to travel using the honors college and gotten to explore the world like I’ve wanted to my whole life. For the study abroad, I hope that you took the chance and traveled to Europe and experienced just as much as the others that have raved about it. I hope that you used this time to really embrace different cultures and picked up a lot of knowledge from these journeys that you had.
I also hope that the friendships that I have made here have blossomed into even better ones than they are now. I bet you remember crying the entire move in process, terrified of the changes that were about to happen, but after playing zombie tag in Chichester the first night with the honors students, feeling so at home. I hope that you have kept in touch with all of the friends that were made during your time in Wheeler and grown closer with other honors members. Although joining a sorority is something I never would’ve planned for myself in high school, joining ADPi was definitely one of the highlights of my freshman year. I hope that you have made the best memories with everyone and have gotten everything out of it that you hoped for. Alpha Delta Pi and honors are already organizations that I am forever grateful for, and I hope that as you’re ending your time at Longwood that you are dreading parting with everyone you’ve met here.
Lastly, I hope that you still have as much, if not more, love for Longwood as I do right now. I hope you’re still so grateful for your decision to attend Longwood, despite all of the people telling you it wouldn’t be for you. I know you proved them all wrong and had the best four years. I can’t wait to see what you’ve accomplished by the time you’re reading this.
Love,
End of freshman year Lily