{"id":3166,"date":"2018-06-27T19:04:34","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T19:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/?p=3166"},"modified":"2018-06-27T19:04:34","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T19:04:34","slug":"part-of-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/2018\/06\/27\/part-of-the-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Part of the Family"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There I was, sitting in the grass on the Mall, surrounded by a sea of black gowns, trying not to let my red pants be a distraction from the Commencement ceremony.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_3173\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3173\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/garrard-and-christina.png\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3173 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/garrard-and-christina-300x200.png\" alt=\"With Garrard McClendon '88\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/garrard-and-christina-300x200.png 300w, https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/garrard-and-christina.png 640w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3173\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">With Garrard McClendon &#8217;88 in Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>My job is to let everyone see what I see \u2013 through stories, photos, and social media \u2013 but I always tell people to pretend I\u2019m not there. (Red pants probably don\u2019t help with that.)<\/p>\n<p>In one of the moments that day when I lowered my camera from my eyes, I caught Sam Gellen \u201918 wave at me as he got in line to get his diploma. I smiled and gave him a thumbs up, and, in that moment, I realized how much I\u2019m rooting for these guys.<\/p>\n<p>My first Wabash Commencement was last year after I had worked at the College for about six months. I had met several students, but I didn\u2019t really know them. This year was different.<\/p>\n<p>Every week this past school year, I had the opportunity to write about a different student. Even though our interviews lasted at most 45 minutes, I consistently walked away feeling like I had seen a different side of each student than I was prepared for.<\/p>\n<p>When we got past what they thought I wanted to hear from a marketing perspective, they really opened up. Some of them shared funny stories, others shared heartbreak. Some of them talked about their achievements, and others talked about learning from their failures.<\/p>\n<p>They made me laugh. They made me cry. And more than once, they made my day.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When Henry WebberHunt \u201918, who loves fish, learned about my deep hatred of sea creatures, he told me I needed therapy.<\/li>\n<li>Ra\u2019Shawn Jones \u201920 got so excited talking with me about his baby niece that he showed me several photos of her on his phone.<\/li>\n<li>One night when I was taking pictures and completely focused, Byshup Rhodes \u201919 came up behind me to say hi and made me almost drop my camera.<\/li>\n<li>Jayvis Gonsalves \u201918 congratulated me on my marriage when he saw an email come from the same Christina who had been emailing him before but now had a different last name.<\/li>\n<li>Jake \u201918 and Nick Budler \u201919 competed with me in a GIF competition on Twitter.<\/li>\n<li>Brock Heffron \u201919 ran over on the football sidelines to give me a high five one day when I was taking photos at football practice.<\/li>\n<li>And, more than once, members of the Sphinx Club have been more than willing to make fools of themselves to help me with social media.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I think I\u2019ve watched more sporting events at Wabash in a year and a half than I did during my four years at my alma mater.<\/p>\n<p>I attended my first Oaken Bucket game last year, and I was quite unimpressed by the size of the prize. I mean, come on. We have a 300-pound bell.<\/p>\n<p>When my husband wanted to do a chemical reaction instead of a unity candle for a wedding ceremony, it was Wabash Professor Laura Wysocki who helped make it happen.<\/p>\n<p>That same day, when our best man brought our car around for us to leave, Post-It notes of all colors covered the <em>entire <\/em>vehicle. Everyone there thought it was the bridal party. I knew better. What I was looking at was the prank the rest of the Wabash Communications and Marketing team had been planning since they received their invitations.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_3172\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3172\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/0B8A9532.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-3172 size-medium\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/0B8A9532-300x200.jpg\" alt=\"At the 2016 Monon Bell game\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/0B8A9532-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/0B8A9532-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/0B8A9532-1024x683.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3172\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">At the 2016 Monon Bell game<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>And it was Garrard McClendon \u201988 who helped me plan my anniversary trip to his city of Chicago exactly one year later.<\/p>\n<p>Sitting there in the grass on Commencement Day, I began to think about the Wabash community \u2013 the Wabash family.<\/p>\n<p>I had written about it.<\/p>\n<p>I had photographed it.<\/p>\n<p>I had tweeted about it.<\/p>\n<p>But it took me until that moment to realize\u2026I\u2019m a part of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There I was, sitting in the grass on the Mall, surrounded by a sea of black gowns, trying not to let my red pants be a distraction from the Commencement ceremony. My [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2018\/06\/0B8A9532-1024x683.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/79"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3166"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3178,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3166\/revisions\/3178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/fyi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}