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Humans of Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH (2026)

12/20/2018

That's a wrap for this semester!
Looking forward to sharing more stories starting on February 1st, 2019.
Thank you for following, commenting, and sharing these stories. Can't wait for you to learn more about the humans of Colby-Sawyer College in 2019!

12/20/2018

“There are moments that I remember from growing up that really made an impression on me. My parents were both from the mid-west… my dad was in the military, so we moved around a lot. There was really just the four of us most of the time. In the summertime, we would come back to the States and visit my mother’s family, but otherwise it was really just the four of us...
I was thinking back to memories of being a little girl; we moved to Germany for the first time for me — my parents and my sister had been there before — and just how different it was. We’d been in the D.C. area before we moved over. I remember a feeling of energy and excitement and we did things as a family then together that we never did afterwards. My parents do not do vacations. My dad’s thing that he’d say is, ‘We were in the military and we lived abroad — those were our vacations.’
But, when we were in Germany, we did do things. Every weekend we would go some place. We went to go visit castles — like the Cinderella castle, you know, from Disney World? That is based on an actual castle in Germany. We went to those castles.
My dad had competition with this guy across the street from us and they would do these 5K’s on the weekends. The way they did it, you wouldn’t get medals, they’d get these metal things that the guys would screw into their walking sticks. You’d see all these guys on the trail with these metal things. So, we’d do these as a family.
I have a memory that we were in the Black Forest — I don’t know if we were in the actual Black Forest — but it was a trail, run, or walk or whatever. There’d be all these people from all over the place. We’d get there, we would sign up. It’d start and my parents were basically like, ‘I’ll see you guys at the end!’
Now, you wouldn’t think that somebody would do this. I was between the ages of 5 and 8 — somewhere in there because that’s when we lived there.
I have memories of running up the trail, but I didn’t know anybody around me — I’m actually a very shy person. I have memories of being tired and somebody, not my parents or anybody I knew, picking me up and putting me on their shoulders and walking me up. At the end, then there’d be a tent and there’d be all these picnic tables… and I’d find my parents again and sit with them. It just makes me think about like, you wouldn’t do that now. I’m not surprised my parents did it then.
There was a lot of stuff that was scary for me growing up, because my dad was in the military and we lived in Germany during the Cold War. My dad was in Intelligence and there was a lot of stuff we couldn’t talk about. My sister wasn’t allowed to go on class field trips because we were kidnap risks because of my dad’s job, which I didn’t realize at the time. I just knew that there was a lot of stuff we couldn’t talk about to our family and our friends.
I also have those memories of just being around people who were different, who were speaking a different language, who didn’t necessarily look different than us, but who clearly were from a different culture, and just how cool that was. At the time, everybody we knew was in the military, so it wasn’t different. But then when we moved to Virginia when we had our last tour, I had more friends who didn’t have a military background.
It made me think about how valuable that experience really was — to be living in a place where you don’t know anybody, and you don’t know anything. And you have to kind of adapt to that and make the most out of it.
As a parent, I just am grateful to my parents that my sister and I had those experiences… I still love to be around different people. I like to just listen to different people and talk.”
Robin Davis, Vice President for Student Development and Dean of Students

12/16/2018

“Right now, the campus isn’t very diverse, and it’s kind of unfortunate, to be honest. I just want to see in the future, more students — not just African-American — but other minorities, also, just to come on campus and come to events like this [Taste of Africa], because we need more people. Right now, the campus seems like... honestly, it’s all white. It really sucks when you look around and you can’t see people that look like you, or at least understand what a minority goes through on campus. They just don’t understand the struggle.
Overall, I know that the campus is open to diversity and I guess at least they’re heading in the right direction.
At one point [last year] there was a confederate flag in someone’s window. In my FYS class, it was all about identity and race and finding yourself and everything. There were only three African-American students in my entire class, the rest of the class was white. It got to the point where whenever me and my friend brought up any ideas of race, people would literally yell at us. They called our arguments or whatever we were saying ‘B.S.’ — they wouldn’t even censor it. People basically knocked us down constantly. It got so bad that I skipped two weeks of class, like, I just could not do it. It was really, really bad. I always talked to my professor about it, and he noticed it too, and he was like, ‘The majority of them are very ignorant.’ And, by the end of it, people were at least open to trying to see our arguments and what we were trying to say. We didn’t expose them to what we were thinking completely, but at least they knew where we were coming from, basically. We ended the year on a much better note because — oh, it was bad.
Just talk to people that aren’t in your general circle. Don’t surround yourself with ‘yes- people’. Try to find people from other races, ethnicities, backgrounds, religions, whatever — anyone who doesn’t identify with you completely. Encourage your similarities, but then also celebrate your differences just as much. If everyone’s the same, life would suck really bad.”
Promise Troah ‘21

12/13/2018

“Diversity to me just means getting a variety of people and personalities and style and culture — anything imaginable on campus. I think Colby-Sawyer does a great job at that because you know, you have different groups, like this group [ASA] and then you have, like, the Pride group, and that’s something I’m into.
I came out as trans last year, on Colby-Sawyer’s campus. Kathleen Farrell has done an amazing job walking me through that. Honestly, I don’t think I would’ve been able to come out and have the support on this campus as if I was anywhere else. I came from a bigger university and they were really accepting, but Colby-Sawyer made me feel at home. I’m really glad that I can express myself and be who I wanna be, and I look around and I see my peers being able to do the same thing.”
Jesse Corriveau ‘20

12/10/2018

“I’ve always had a hard time reconciling the fact that I’m not African-American because I came here when I was 11. I didn’t really fit in with all the highschoolers or the middle-schoolers and people kind of made fun of me or made me feel like an outcast for it. I’m from Eritrea originally. I was born and raised there. I went to Boston, straight out. My very first winter experience was in 2009 in Boston. I brought home a ball of snow, I was like, ‘I’m gonna save this for my siblings!’
I never got to really express the true part of my personality when I was in school most of the time because I had to act tough or be different so that most people didn’t tease me. Even though I didn’t have an accent, people definitely found a reason to make me feel like an outcast. So, I learned by finding different poets, by always reading, by talking to adults all the time, and just learning more about the world. It’s embracing myself that’s gonna make people realize I’m not gonna take it anymore.
So that’s why it’s important to me because people here feel like they only have to be friends with a certain group of people in order to thrive in college, but that’s not true. If you’re you completely, you should be able to explore whatever part of your personality you want to, without feeling like you’re gonna be ridiculed or persecuted for it.
I think that the people who are open minded have expressed their open-mindedness. But, the people that aren’t don’t really come out and talk to us about it. I can understand why. If you have an unpopular opinion, you might feel like you’re gonna be persecuted for it. I do respect everyone’s right to their own opinion, but I haven’t really come across people that actually, completely believe something as radical as, ‘Diversity is not important’ or that, ’Black people aren’t oppressed’ and things like that. I can’t say I’ve noticed a change either way, but I have noticed a growth in the conversation on the topic.”
Mea Petros ‘19

12/07/2018

“I think that words have power. But, because of the tools of something deeper. They’re tools of attitudes where we try to put people down because they’re different than we are. So, we’ve created all these words to be able to put people in these negative categories. I would like to live in a world where we don’t see difference as bad. Where, for example, gay people or black people, no one has to take some negative word and reclaim it, because we’re not using that type of language where we all see each other, we recognize each other as human dignity, and respect each other for who we are.
I may be saying all this because right now in my American Rebels class, we’re studying Bobby Kennedy, who was this great idealist whose big speeches in 1968 were about unity. We’ve got some really big problems in this country, but if we come together — black, white, male, female, north, south — if we all come together and try to deal with those problems, we’re going to be in a better place. And for me, what we did today, and his message, are really important to think about in our world today because we have too many people in power — democrats and republicans — who are exploiting anger, exploiting differences, exploiting fear. That’s where a lot of this stuff comes from. People are afraid, they’re nervous about people that are different than them. And so, we make up these words and we make up these attitudes. One of the things I respect about Bobby Kennedy is that he said, ‘We’ve got to get away from that, we’ve got to stop this. We gotta think about ourselves as all of Americans and a global community, trying together to make life good for as many of us as we can, for all of us.’
Instead, we have a lot of leaders today who are finding ways to stoke anger, stoke fear, they engage in name calling. Some of my students have said it’s kind of a depressing time to live, and I get that. I do think it can be very disconcerting. Every morning when I check the news, I see scary stuff. It could be attacks on synagogues, it could be attacks by white supremacists, and that’s bad. I think what we need to have are more voices of people, and maybe not wait around for presidents or senators or whoever, to say these things, but to speak out ourselves and say, ‘Hey, let’s stop it. Stop the violence, stop the name calling, stop the promoting of differences and conflict.’”
Randy Hanson, Professor of History and Political Studies

12/06/2018

“I think diversity, especially on this campus — there’s not much. Coming into this school my freshman year, it was kind of like a culture shock — coming from Boston — where I saw diversity. So, coming here, ASA was already established, but this kind of event [Taste of Africa] was not. When I came in, the president at that time was leaving, so that’s when I took over. The officers now also were there. We were like, ‘We need to have some kind of event to bring more diversity and bring all people together.’
Some people label diversity as just having black people or just having Asian people. That’s not what it is. It’s more, like, unifying all people into a group setting. I see a lot more of that now than I did my freshman year. Freshman year, it was, like, more categorized — black people over here, Asian people over here, white people over here. But, now it’s more integrated and a lot more accepted. Thank you to everyone who came tonight.”
Catrina Hamilton ‘19

12/05/2018

“I think it’s very important going into college for you to be more exposed to different cultures and ethnicities. It’s different from you always being at home and your parents, when you’re younger, they enforce norms and values on what they have grown up from and what they’ve been around onto you. But, as you get older and as your generation gets older, you have to be more exposed. The world is not just as you see it or as your parents saw it for you. You have to be more aware and exposed to more people that look different than you, talk different than you, act, and are born basically around different things that you have not been used to. It does affect the way you can probably progress in life and hinder relationships with people if you’re not aware, and not trying to become aware, about social things that are going on, and things that you have to fix within yourself to be aware about other people that you’re with.”
Kayia Alleyne ‘21

12/03/2018

“This is Rex, he is a six month old border collie. This was his first time at the pet therapy day. I wasn’t sure how he was gonna do, but I think he did well, it was good. I like bringing him to this and finding a way to connect with students, outside the office. This is my third border collie, and what’s different about border collies — I’ve had labs before — they are always looking at the whole landscape, always keeping an eye on everything. And then they find the thing that they’re gonna focus on and then they really focus on that. It’s just an interesting way to see how they interact with people and the world, and you, as their person, have to interact with them as well.
He’s very lovable and just positive. He’s not fearful, he’s not distrusting of people. He just wants to play and just bounds right in. At home, he just races around the house — and he’s very athletic — so he’ll just, like, take a flying leap and land in our lap. He’s not very well disciplined yet, but it’s kind of hard to get mad at it because he’s just so excited about everything.”
Karin Berthiaume, Assistant Director of Residential Education

11/29/2018

“I think having such a small diverse community on campus, knowing who we are and what we stand for is important not only to us, but to everybody else. It tells our story of who we are and where we come from. But, it also allows other people to see that even though we’re different, we’re kind of the same. Events that we put on that are diverse or cultural aren’t to push our culture on people… Even though we’re in such a small town with a lot of white people, they still are able to have the opportunity to learn about different cultures, that maybe they’d never have.
We can’t say it’s perfect, but we can’t say it’s horrible, either. I think diversity has decreased, but I think that the people that are still here are trying to keep it alive. That’s what matters. So, even though we’re lower in numbers, I think we’re still high in passion and we still want to encourage people to learn about our cultures. Maybe it hasn’t changed, but it also hasn’t become worse because the people that work for diversity to still be on campus are passionate about it.”
Paulina Olvera ‘19

11/28/2018

“I am originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And, I came to the United States when I was 16, and I went to a boarding school in Maine for two years — so junior and senior year. Then, right after that, I went to a community college for a year. I was looking at different colleges to apply to to transfer, and my substitute teacher from my boarding school, his son goes here. He was like, ‘I need an excuse to go see my son, do you want to go on a tour?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’ And, we went on the tour; his son gave me the tour. I became really close friends with the kid and I applied immediately after because they had really promising financial aid, so I wanted to grab onto that as fast as I could. And, so yeah, I’ve been here since.
I’m a nursing major, I’m trying to sneak in a photography minor — but right now, just nursing major. I really like the clinical rotation. Second semester sophomore year is when we started clinical rotations, and it was a little stressful at first. But, coming into junior year, I felt like I could handle it more than I was able to sophomore year. I think the clinical experience and the fact that we started early is why you have a lot of students having high passing rate success when they take the boards or the NCLEX.
We go into different units and different specialties. We have a rotation there to see whether we like it or not, basically to help us prep for the NCLEX as well, and to give us a well rounded clinical experience for when we go out into the real world.
This semester I am in specialties, which means I did mental health for the first part of the semester and then second part I did pediatrics, and third part, which I’m in right now, I’m doing maternity. I have yet to see my birth, I wanna see a birth real bad! But, I have not seen it yet, but I’m super excited because I have six more days in maternity, so hopefully I’ll see a birth!
I’m still planning on becoming an E.R. nurse, an emergency room nurse. I like the adrenaline, I like to think on my feet, and save a person’s life, and send them on their way. I’m real excited to work in the E.R… chances are I’m going to like it when I do my externship as well.
I would say don’t overwhelm yourself. It is a challenging program, but does not mean that it’s going to be your entire life. Your career does not define you. It’s just one part of who you are, it doesn’t sum up who you are… make sure you enjoy it, don’t just stress out.”
Nathnael “Nate” Feleke ’20

11/20/2018

“I’m from Virginia — Northern Virginia — and I came here because I was recruited for rugby. When I saw the school, I really loved it, and so I came. I haven’t been playing for long, but I like the aggressiveness. The part I like most about it is my family on the team. It’s not just like we’re friends, it’s like we’re a whole family, and we care about each other a lot. It was not hard transitioning. I fell in love with it ever since. I have not really been homesick ‘cause it’s a whole ‘nother family on this team.”
Jonai “Cookie” Sheppard ‘22

Humans of Colby-Sawyer College

12/20/2018

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