Everyone wants their college experience to be a movie.
For the past 244 days, I have been filming my senior year on a 2010 Canon Vixia HFM300 camcorder. And for the past three hours, I have been hopelessly trying to condense hours of basketball games, intramural championships, craft nights, wine walks and bucket-list activities into a 90-minute story of my last year of college.
It’s impossible.
It’s only seven months.
I open my phone and scroll back to freshman year. I’ve never had trouble capturing a moment to save for my future self. A picture after every Finn game. A group selfie after a weekly Quizzo loss. Ever want to know what the church looked like at 8:24 a.m. on Jan. 27, 2023? The sky was bright and blue as I walked across the bridge to my 8:30 a.m. Theology class in Tolentine.
There have been very few times in the past four years that I’ve been able to look back at what I’ve captured here. Fixing a roof in Mullins, South Carolina. A Badminton tournament in Maryland. Filming documentaries in the Philippines, the Shinnecock Nation, and Morocco.
But there’s so much more that exists outside my camera roll. Villanova gave me incredible opportunities to travel, explore my interests and try new hobbies. But it’s the people I found here that breathe life into the photos and the film. It’s the memories of laughter and the conversations of care that follow. You don’t have to go far to make a movie. You can find one right where you are.
There’s one on Tuesday nights at the Villanovan Office. There’s one in Garey 23C, the Social Justice Documentary Lab. There’s one in every van ride to service trips, in the Mullen Theater scene shop, on the intramural basketball court. You don’t even need a camera to capture it. You just need to open yourself to the story that it will tell.
To the underclassmen: Try something new. Say yes to staying up late with your friends. Get up early to pursue your passions. Take a crazy class. The best movies come unexpectedly.
To my fellow seniors: Your movie doesn’t end here. Your spin-off season just got greenlit. It’s time to pack up what we have learned at Villanova, the adventures we have had, the high points and the lows, and bring it out of the bubble. Keep the characters you have found here close, and reflect on the story arc that made who you are. There are plenty more stories to come.
