The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 10/9/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: courtesy of flickr.com Gilly the Weatherman graced Boston Common in Emerson's past.

I was mentally prepared for the hippies. I figured I’d be fine with the chain-smokers.  I worried that I wasn’t “indie” enough, that I didn’t know enough about Barack Obama and that I’d come home addicted, at the very least, to speed.

This was the Emerson I spent all summer bracing myself for before this, my freshman year.  As I packed for school, I was told by my friends to not “come back really weird” and by my fairly conservative dad to “try not to be a liberal communist.”
Then there was the image provided by the Princeton Review: “#12 Dodgeball Targets” and “#2 Dissatisfied with Student Aid.”  I didn’t know which was scarier.

My experience so far can instead be loosely compared to the college that Emerson showed me as a high school senior.  By the time I stepped onto campus, I had forgotten the photos of perpetual-motion students that had been placed meticulously on all the application brochures.  Until I arrived on Boylston, I was sure that kind of passion was a facade put on by Admission.

Then I saw.  The joking references to speed make much more sense when paired with a buzzing student body all pursuing their careers, and five other alternatives, with intense determination.

It quickly became apparent how Emerson gains an arrogant reputation: most of my peers have a lot to brag about.  While “Hooray!” and some of the other orientation events showed me that as a Democrat with a tattoo I’d fit in perfectly, there was no quicker way to feel out of place than by listening to two peers speak of their book publishings at the age of 16.

Regardless of how busy I think I am in any given week, it seems that the rest of the college is doing 10 times more five times as fast.  And many students do not hesitate to make that distinction, citing another reason for Emerson’s pretentious reputation: actual pretentiousness.  Make no mistake, even though the majority of students are humble, Emerson has a few who could use an ego check.

Amidst the boasting, gaining real world experience, especially in the city, is a crucial advantage.  It makes sense that students get their money’s worth by getting involved in every organization and publication they can.  As the price of living in Boston clashes against a crippling economy, graduates need to have an edge in the job market more than ever before.  Although I love Emerson, it’s terrifying to realize that I’m attending a $40,000 per year school only to graduate into a job paying much less.

A college tour will obviously never openly state this aspect, instead focusing on presenting a large list of successful  alumni.  Admission is also never going to tell you that Quidditch is arguably the most popular sport; that not every room is as large as the ones shown on tour, or that the food just isn’t that great.  Instead they sing the praises of a strong intramural program and cater the “Picture Yourself” program at an extravagant hotel.

Those parts of Emerson have emerged slowly since my arrival (in addition to the fact that spandex is an appropriate substitution for pants).  The freshmen are now more than a month into school and the stereotypes have started to emerge—the chain smokers are for real and the hippies came out for Hempfest, but hardcore drugs aren’t quite given out like candy.  Regardless of the hype, one aspect of Emerson College that has held true for years still stands: most of us do make fantastic dodgeball targets.


Jussie Martin is a freshman print journalism major and a contributor to The Beacon.



There is nothing like the scent of October. The sweet aroma of fallen leaves on the verge of rot, the sharp tang of a chilly wind, the apples and pumpkins, peanuts and Cracker Jacks. October is distinct.

It was in October five years ago that I, along with the rest of the newly matriculated Class of 2007, began to feel at home in Boston, at Emerson College, in the Little Building. The euphoria of moving to a new city, being greeted by waves of overzealous Orientation Leaders and answering “What’s your major?” at every turn had worn off, dampened by the crush of classes and the growing banality of a not-so-new environment.

The previous spring, I’d stayed on campus for April Preview (then an overnight event) and was overcome by the flood of Emersonians streaming down Boylston Street. I believe “interesting” was my mother’s word of choice. Only a small swath of gray sidewalk could be seen under the living, breathing, smoking rainbow of people. Orange mohawks, lime-green muumuus, hot pink Chuck Taylors, blue-tinted dreadlocks – I wasn’t sure if my more conservative style would make me too conspicuous, or, worse, invisible.

But by October, the rainbow had faded somewhat, Emerson’s class of 2003 having taken some of that color out into the world. My class had its share of Manic Panic fans for sure, but compared to the upperclassmen, we were, well, normal. Bland. We were part of the new guard of Emersonians, straddling the transition from character-and-history-rich, Back-Bay brownstones to new, sharp and technologically enhanced Theatre District digs. We were creative without being overwhelmingly “artsy.” More academic. More athletic. But back then, Old Emerson was still showing its colors.

It was in October four years ago that The Facebook, as it was originally called, took over campus. It was only available to a dozen or so schools then, with just a few hundred members total. Emerson was one of the first colleges on The Facebook, my friends and I among the first to sign up. Every day you’d look to see if your hometown friends’ schools had been added. You couldn’t add applications or post photos, and there was no such thing as a global group, but you could poke, poke, poke everyone you knew.

It was also that Oct. in which the Red Sox finally kept their act together long enough to win a World Series. In 2004 there was a different kind of lamentation at Emerson after the Yanks and Sox faced off in the ALCS. Not the usual disappointment of watching one’s team miss yet another chance at glory, but the shock and sorrow of losing one of your own. You didn’t have to know Victoria Snelgrove to feel the impact of her death on campus.

Torie’s death was sudden, controversial and achingly public. She is certainly not the only tragic figure attached to Emerson: a year and a half later, a crane accident on the Piano Row construction site killed three people along the very stretch of land where I had once seen a living rainbow trod, where the Pats and Sox had glided along on Duck Boats following championship victories. But other figures, once well-known to Emersonians and others in our little nook of downtown and Back Bay, come and go with less notice.

When did I realize The Weatherman was gone? I can’t say for sure it was in October, or even if I was still living on campus. Gilly used to sit on his perch on Boston Common near the baseball field and yell pleasantly, “It’s raining!” as a gentle mist moistened your face; “Hot and sunny!” as beads of sweat rolled into your eyes. His weather reports were never news, but he delivered them with a smile, sometimes playing his keyboard, sometimes dressed in his full-body Cat-in-the-Hat suit. The Weatherman would split during the harshest of weather. Then one day in the spring, you’d be sitting in the dining hall and suddenly see a Seussian figure weaving through the Common, patting children on the head and no doubt telling them, “A little cloudy today.” But one spring Gilbert Foley didn’t return.

Gilly exists in an Emerson world where there is still a West side, where at 1 a.m. you are forced to look at your alcohol-blotched face in the mirror-walls at New York Pizza, where half the campus dons orange scarves and multicolored bracelets, signifiers for myriad causes. The Facebook connected classmates. Torie’s death brought them together in a shared tragedy. And the Weatherman was someone everyone knew.

This is my sixth year at Emerson, and I can’t say that, fundamentally, the school has changed all that much. The real change is in the loss of old faces and places and the emergence of new ones. In four years, today’s freshmen will have a different collection of memories. Different people and moments will bring them together and define what Emerson means to them.

October may have a particular fragrance, but this world enveloped by the bouquet of pumpkins and ballpark pretzels continues to evolve. Emerson, like this month, remains constant at the core, but a single October never has the same face as the one that came before it.


Rebecca Anne Flanagan is a second-year MFA student in creative writing and a former managing editor of The Beacon.

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