As I turned the corner, I made eye contact with the next presumed stranger. Instead, I saw a face that I recognized. Sylvia and I chatted for a few minutes, I met her mother, and we walked away with tentative plans to meet up soon. It was so nice to have the familiarity of both of my “worlds”—Middlebury and New York—all in one moment.

When I first started at Middlebury, I tried to separate the two. I wanted to maintain my city life, but also experience Middlebury to the fullest. My time at Middlebury seemed entirely campus-centered. Two and half years later, my experiences in both places are so intertwined that I cannot imagine putting them into separate categories. My friends from each place know each other, and if not, then at least names and plenty of stories—enough that if these friends were to meet, they would waste little time playing catch up. There are definitely parts of my urban upbringing that I may never adapt to life at Middlebury. I do not always remember that cars will stop for me in Vermont. Sometimes the drivers and I engage in a long waiting game as I stand on the curb, expecting them to pass me first. On the other hand, my penchant for flannel is a little foreign to my friends and family at home. That said, my life at Middlebury and my life at home are now virtually one and the same.

As I look ahead to this summer, I am so grateful that my Middlebury experience is not restricted to life on campus. I am spending the summer in Washington, D.C., a city with which I am unfamiliar. Without realizing it, I chose a city that also has a substantial Middlebury population, at least during the 2008 summer. My community is being transplanted from Middlebury to D.C., and I couldn’t be happier. I am still looking forward to exploring a new city, to being one of those anonymous faces in the rush of urban life, but I will be on the lookout for some familiar Middlebury faces too.

I chuckled as I looked out at my sister’s fenced-in plot of nature. At Middlebury, I have been “introduced” to nature firsthand. I spent my first few semesters admiring the natural beauty from afar—from my room in Ross, overlooking the Champlain Valley and the Adirondacks to the west. I had a few outdoor labs for my first-year seminar, but I think I was too wrapped up in the newness of school to realize what a fantastic opportunity the surrounding areas offered. It was only this year when nature and I finally had a real introduction. I went on my first hike—a great hike—up Camel’s Hump, part of the Green Mountains in Huntington. From the peak you can look across from New Hampshire to New York. It was one of the best days I’ve had in Vermont.

Later in the year, I spent five out of our thirteen lab periods outside for my introductory biology class. During our first lab, we stomped through a few feet of snow into a patch of forest behind Bihall. A few of us seemed to freeze immediately, but when we went out into the snow a few weeks later, we were not as bothered by the cold. This time we explored a part of the forest held by the Middlebury Area Land Trust, a local non-profit land conservation organization. My lab partner and I counted different tree species in our plots to determine the impact of an invasive tree species, European Buckthorn. I had no idea that invasive plants posed such a problem in Vermont. Now I can recognize the native and non-native species and understand what the threat of species displacement means, even on a small-scale.

Once the snow melted, the outdoor labs were truly a blast. We threw on “waders”—either thigh-high or chest-high rubber boots—in order to examine the ecology of the Middlebury River. We walked upstream and downstream, in the sun and in the rain, to observe the variety of aquatic insects and categorize them. My lab partner, another student from a city, showed how out of our element we were when she used her umbrella during lab, even when we strode into the middle of the river. At one point, I even fell in the water (thigh-high waders were of no use then), but it was still a privilege to be at the river. I thought about how fortunate I was to go to a school like Middlebury, to have an experience like this one. Not only was I able to take advantage of the natural beauty around me, but also to do it in my free time and in class. I only hope my sister has the same opportunity as part of her education.