It’s freshman year, and you’ve just moved into the Village. You and your new roommate(s) have only fifteen minutes to say goodbye to your families before you are sent off on a Green Machine for an overnight getaway to Camp Greylock. Excited and afraid, you learn the ropes of a daily Deerfield routine, beginning to adjust from being away from home and understand what it means to be independent. Suddenly, the first snow falls, and before you know it, you are experiencing your first New England winter. You learn how to properly bundle yourself to escape the cold and keep yourself strong when the days grow dark. When the ice begins to thaw, you grow obsessed with spending time by the river. You feel sluggish as the year comes to a close. Finally, as you watch the seniors walk towards the graduation tent, you imagine yourself sitting right where they are. What do you hope to accomplish? Who do you hope to be? You have all the time in the world to figure it all out.
Before you know it, junior year arrives, and you are no longer an underclassman. With later check-ins and no study hall, you’ve never felt freer. However, this new found exhilaration will soon come to an abrupt end as standardized tests and college visits fill you with dread. Spending all your time in textbooks, you question your sanity a few times. As you throw on your white apparel, you soberly say goodbye to your senior friends, ready to lead Step Up. You prepare yourself for the year ahead as you ponder what impact you will make on this school.
Finally, you are a senior! Privilege and priority make you feel powerful. You are now entitled to walk on senior grass and sit at senior tables. You are at the top of the food chain. You swear you’ve never been more stressed when college acceptances come out. When you decide where you’ll go, senioritis hits, and your only concern now will be enjoying your final days in the valley. You have a newfound appreciation for things you previously deemed mundane, and ebullient moments that used to fill you with joy have now turned bittersweet. Diploma in hand, you look around at all the faces you’ll miss as you walk across the stage and into the world, away from the place you once called home away from home.
But what about your sophomore year? Why is this year never talked about? When reviewing your most prominent years at Deerfield, I guarantee you sophomore year is not the first that comes to mind. Sophomore year has often been called the “middle child” of all years at Deerfield, the Goldilocks, if you will.
You are not yet an upperclassman, although you have some authority over the freshman. You no longer have a roommate, though you still have study hall and an earlier check-in. You are not the spoiled baby of the family nor the beloved firstborn. Instead, you are stuck in the middle with both the disadvantages of being the younger and older child. You meet new friends and say goodbye to old ones that didn’t work out. You challenge yourself in school yet do not have much say in the choices of your classes. You get to live on your own but begin to miss the constant chaos of two or three lives compacted into one singular dorm room.
Everyone seems to be solidifying their friend groups, finding significant others, and discovering their place on campus. They’re applying for leadership positions of clubs and alliances and you do the same, wanting good results for them but ultimately, hoping for the best for yourself, feeling the pressure of college matriculation starting to creep up on the back of your head.
You still have time to figure out who you are and what you want to do, yet the years are flying by, and before you know it, you are a rising junior. Then you are a senior, and soon you will be walking across the stage, looking out at the faces you’ll miss.