Turning a new page: 10 books for graduating seniors
By Sarah Miller | April 18, 2024As an English major, people often make small talk with me by asking about my favorite books.
Sarah Miller '24 (she/her) is an Editor at Large.
She previously served as Opinions Editor and Staff Writer. Miller is an English major on the Creative Writing track. She hails from Philadelphia and spent the spring studying English at Trinity College Dublin. She has interned for The New England Review and hosts a WRMC radio show where you can still listen to her many opinions.
As an English major, people often make small talk with me by asking about my favorite books.
Instagram announced a big change this February: It would begin to limit political content. I didn’t notice this change until a few weeks ago when many of my Middlebury classmates began to post pleas to circulate a text post instructing us how and why we should self-select back into being shown political ...
When I tell people I took a class on porn — “Decolonizing Porn: Circulating Desire Between Europe and the Americas,” to be more specific — the question that invariably follows is “Did you watch porn in class?” To that, I say, yes, sort of, but we watched most of the porn outside of ...
Membership in the cult of beauty is a prerequisite for girlhood. I can’t remember when beauty became my governing power, can't remember an age when I did not look at myself with the eye of an appraiser. If there’s escape from the cult, I’ve yet to find it.
Each semester brings in a new crop of eager-eyed first years, pushing the seniors out into “the real world.” Living in Forest Hall as a senior gives me an intimate window into my own obsolescence. At one end of the hall lurk the silent underclassmen while at the other end of the hall Baby Febs splay ...
In March of my senior year of high school, I told my best friend that I couldn’t wait to be at an institution where more people had read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” a text that at the time struck me as the apex of literary pretension. Thankfully she laughed in my face. Yet I remained committed ...
That evening, picking up the prescription from the CVS counter, had the ring of an anti-climax. I resisted treating my anxiety with medication for so long, but when the crisis point came, the decision to take Prozac was easy. My anxiety was just another problem in need of solving.
As I approach the end of my final fall semester at Middlebury, I have found myself grappling with the realization that, forgoing any eleventh-hour surprises, I will likely graduate without experiencing a romantic college relationship. That fact has forced me to admit that over the past couple of weeks, ...
I tried hard to write my Common App on race. It seemed like the smart choice. Early in my college admissions process, I had gotten the sense from educators and peers that my biraciality was the only aspect of my personality that distinguished me from the hundreds of other straight-A private school ...
The night after I was mugged, I clipped my chin on the Canal Street pavement. We were heading home from one of our favorite pubs, slightly drunk, when one of my friends got the idea to give me a piggyback ride. Though I protested a little, these were new friends, study abroad friends, and I was ...