Searching, Finding

Today's class was much different than the past classes. To start off, yesterday Dean Almandrez had told us to wear comfortable clothes today, ones we could go running around in. Naturally, we had all been anticipating today and wondering what we would be doing that required a set of athletic clothes.

Well, we found out today what Dean Almandrez had in store for us. After putting all the girls into groups of 5, she had us come up with teamnames as well as a team cheer. My team, Patchouli Riptide, consisted of Erin, Valentina, Maia, and Eva. Tory then passed out a list of items and places as Dean Almandrez explained the scavenger hunt. We needed to take pictures of us with all the things, places, and people, with things like "Group photo at the Wriston Quad", "Group photo with a Brown employee", "a gender neutral bathroom" and more of the like. Our groups ran off as soon as our instructor told us to. After about an hour of running all around the Brown University campus, my group was able to come in second place, right after Esme's team. When all the groups has finally finished and arrived back to class, Dean Almandrez told us that we didn't have to go in competitive groups, that we could have all worked together and everyone would have gotten into first place. Besides for fun, Dean Almandrez said she had placed us into this activity to show that competition isn't always necessary.

When the morning class session was over, Erin, Tyler, Phoebe, Sara and I grabbed takeout from the Ratty before heading to the Front Green for a Tie-Dye activity. It was my first time making tie-dye, so I was excited at doing this activity. I'm excited to see how my shirt comes out when I rinse it tomorrow.

In the afternoon session, the class met Justice and Victor, who were hosting and leading a Trans-Identity Workshop that addressed tran-related topics such as gender vs. sex, transmisogyny, cissexism, and more. We had a lot of disussion on whether all-women's institutions like Bryn Mawr were politically correct or not in the exclusion of transwomen. It was a very conflicting topic, but it made for interesting discussion nonetheless. This workshop definitely taught me a lot about trans-identity, something I had never really been familiar with. Justice and Victor definitely did a great job with the workshop.

After a quick nap in my dorm, I got ready to see Ms. Neal at the Main Green for some information about the next few days. Once Brown-I and II all arrived, Ms. Neal went over how we would be going about this Friday, when the Pre-College session officially ends for us and we would be moving on to Boston to tour Harvard, Yale, and Wellesley. Ms. Neal also got us cards and envelopes to send to our families.

Right after, Erin and I met up with Phoebe and Tyler and ate at the Ratty before going to the highest floor at the John D. Rockefeller Library to watch the gorgeous sunset setting over Providence.