passwords and women's education

McPucks1357
Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:35:47 +0000

A blog post about Smith I think is worth sharing (written by a friend of mine)…

passwords and women’s education

When I was taking the password off of this blog, I wrote a long entry on passwords and the false sense of privacy created by the internet. But while writing it, I was unable to articulate why had I initially password protected blogsnob. It was partially because of This, which I knew might publish some of the things on here. But there was also something deeper, the desire to protect Smith against an outsider’s perception. Smith College is such a wonderfully ridiculous place. To say that among Smithies is funny and silly, but I always feel like Smith is subject to so much judgment from the outside world. For me, going to an “all-girls’ school” has always been burdened with criticism; I hate having to constantly defend my choice of a single-sex education. For instance, my grandfather, a life-long academic, said Smith was just a glorified finishing school. (I responded that it wouldn’t be a problem since I was majoring in Home-Ec.)

This vulnerability makes you want to hug Smith and hold it until everyone realizes how great it truly is. But Smith is a delicate eco-system: one push in the wrong direction and the balance of hipsters, Green-Streeters, the obnoxiously proud, the obnoxious that-girls, and the rest would be thrown out of equilibrium. While each Smithie has a highly individual perspective, there is a common love for the inexplicable Smith, a feeling which is more than a compilation of buildings and students but rather ideas coming together and a sense of mutual respect. I might be too idealistic, but I do believe the conceptual Smith as is real in each of our hearts. That quest for a little taste of Smith while you’re gone is why you’ve secretly read Commencement, but the vast differences in each of our experiences are why you hated it. It’s because this place cannot be summed up by one book, whether published by an alum or by admissions. However, taken as a whole, the blogs of this community do sum up our experiences and that’s why I’ve become fascinated with them. While they range in their level of wonderful ridiculousness, at the end of the day, they are all so Smith, and for that alone, you have to love them.