Can you believe graduation is just around the corner? I couldn’t; or at least I couldn’t until the day last week when I watched College Archivist Lisa Murphy build a library display from old pictures and old traditions of previous commencements. You can see her work in the display case across from the circulation desk.

I’m Mallory Zink, a German and International Area Studies double major and a proud member of the graduating class of 2015—whoo-whoo! I still can’t wrap my head around my own commencement in two months! Wasn’t it only yesterday parents were moving us into Trowbridge, Hoben and Harmon; with mini-fridges, collapsible chairs, and a new ‘college edition’ bed comforter?

We met and made friends, joined clubs, did a mountain of homework, created memories. Later, especially after study abroad, a lot of us moved out of the dorms and split rent for our first ‘real’ houses, in the Vine Street area heavily populated with college students from K and Western. Our residences may have changed; the mountains of homework didn’t. We (or maybe, mostly, I) almost never read the entire 200 pages for our 400-level course in the allotted two-day time period, not because we were (or maybe, mostly, I was) out partying (well…), but instead we were applying for jobs and grad schools! (I’m sticking with that story.)

While I talked with Lisa as she built her display, I wondered if the graduating class of 1909 felt the same way we did freshman year? Did they share their excitement via some turn-of-the-century (the 19th to 20th!) counterpart to “hashtag-Kalamazoo College bound?” Did a young woman with an interest in studying German feel lucky when she got the last teal shower caddy at the bookstore? Was there a bookstore? As the days until graduation dwindled, did they hear as many times as we do: “What is your plan for next year?”

I think every senior dreads that question until she has a plan for the following year…then we (or maybe, mostly, I) begin to hope, maybe even beg, that people will start asking us (me) about our plans, even strangers on the street. I hugged an innocent stranger after I finalized my plans for next year! (I’ll put my major to use when I begin my master’s degree at the University of Bonn in Germany…I told you I was begging to tell someone!)

I like the ‘Class Day Exercises” graduates of the early 1930s did. I like the piano outdoors and the horse and buggy in the background (you can barely see them in the upper left corner). The stage is set where Anderson Athletic Center and facilities management are located today. I bet that class didn’t have to hear the Amtrak train horn.

In 1905 the entire senior class would breakfast at a professor’s or the president’s house. That seems cool, though 300-plus members of the class of 2015 wouldn’t fit in Hodge House.

In the late 1920s a senior class play was a commencement tradition. Hmm. Maybe Festival Playhouse’s production of CARRIE the musical will serve for our class. After all, senior prom is temporally close to graduation. In the novel the title character kind of addressed any potential overcrowding at a hypothetical commencement breakfast.

It was fun to visit Lisa and check out her display, the old photos in particular…so much different; so much shared.

Commencement for the class of 2015 will take place on Sunday, June 14th at 1 p.m. on the campus quadrangle. I hope to see you there. I wonder what they checked out for more info in 1909.

Text by Mallory Zink ’15. Photos courtesy of Kalamazoo College Archivist Lisa Murphy ’98.