Where’s my classroom?

Usually the first days of a semester students spend a couple of days learning the “routine” of getting to each class.  What is the shortest route? Where’s a good spot to stop and catch up with friends, classmates, or dare we say “parents?” However compact the campus of Westminster College may be, it is sometimes hard to know where your class might meet.

Whether your class meets in the bi-campus classroom with classmates in Mesa, Arizona, on the steps of the columns reciting Dr. King’s March on Washington Speech and speaking of dreams for the four years to come, the lower level of the Historic Gym still reverberating with the voices of Churchill, Thatcher, or Reagan, or under a tree discussing genetics, the world is really your classroom.

WSM 101 is the freshman seminar every new student takes. It’s a class about meeting yourself and the campus and deciding which road to travel, or whether to make your own.  This semester, the seminar has studied leadership by participating in a video/photo shoot for student Yangmali’s non-profit organization to help employ, educate, and feed single women of Nepal.

Most recently, the seminar has studied faith/belief/values of Westminster and themselves by participating in a shirt painting and awareness raising project sponsored by the student-led Remley Women’s Center with a discussion about “secret keeping” in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned in WSM 101 is that college raises almost as many questions as it  gives answers, for example, “Where’s my classroom today?”

Kat Barden is Head of Public Services at Reeves Library