Excited about life.

Hello, Rishya!

Hi Sophie, how are you?

Good! So, this is your senior interview. So a question I have for you, is, what made you want to be involved in Humans of William & Mary?

So, I talked about this a little in my application. I wanted to be in Humans of William & Mary since my sophomore year. But I remember being really intimidated by the application because I didn’t really know how to answer a lot of the questions, but then on top of that I’m your typical William and Mary student, overcommitted. Then senior year, I had free time, and I was like, “what do I do with this?” I still had a lot of commitments in the fall, but I knew my spring was  going to be empty, and I was like “this is my chance,” I’ve wanted to do this for three years and now I’m finally going to do it. The reason was mostly because I really like talking to people. Not even talking to people as much as listening to people’s stories. I genuinely love making friends, and I love meeting new people, from the bottom of my heart in the most genuine sense. I love hanging out and just listening to people talk about their stories. I remember when we did our first interview with Michelle, and we interviewed a transfer student, and she was so happy and we just asked her about herself and what she was doing. It was the most basic question, but she had so much passion and was so happy, it reminded me of why I joined Humans and why I joined William and Mary in the first place. You get to see that from people who don’t necessarily come out and talk about what they want to talk about, they don’t have positions in which they are able to do that.

Yeah, exactly. That’s awesome. And I agree that it does make you appreciate it a lot more because it is so easy to get overwhelmed and forget what makes William & Mary special. That’s awesome that you wanted to do Humans because you are a people person. Have you always been a people person?

I think so. I think I have, but a lot of my friends aren’t, so I always thought that “maybe I’m not.” But it took me a long time, like junior year of college, to realize that I actually do enjoy talking to people and enjoy meeting new people. And the reason was mostly through school and through college, all of my friends were introverted, which is totally fine, and I very much appreciate that, and I think the reason that I’m friends with all of these people is because I like listening to them, and they’re usually people who don’t get to talk in big group settings, and that’s who I’m usually drawn to. For the longest time I thought that I wasn’t, because all my friends weren’t people persons so I must not be a people person, and it took me a long time to realize that I’m very much an extroverted person and that I very much get my energy from being around people and from being around people that make me happy. So it’s not that I wasn’t, I think that I always have been, it just took me a while to realize that this is what makes me happy.

Yeah, that’s so cool, and that leads me into another thing that I was curious about, how do you think you’ve changed, now that you’re graduating, since you’ve joined Humans? Or since you’ve been a freshman, what has changed within you?

Let me answer with William & Mary first. I think that they’ve both been very transformative experiences in general, but with any college experience, it’s changed me in so many different ways than I thought were possible, and to this day I don’t think I know how much I’ve actually changed, I just notice things that I’ve done in the past and I was like “wow, that’s so weird, I never would have done that if I was anyone else or if I did things any differently.” A lot of things here have helped me grow through experiences in my life. Like, sophomore year was really rough for me, just like experiences that you wouldn’t expect to happen, like all of my friends are wonderful people, so I just didn’t expect that. I also tend to get attached to people very easily, not in a bad way I think, just I think that these people are good for me, so I spend a lot of time with them and invest a lot of time with them. And then that led to a lot of specific problems and it wasn’t anyone’s fault, it was just the way we reacted to different situations was very different and I had to separate myself from the situation because it was affecting my life. And that really changed me, and I asked my friend last month how I had changed, because they had known me since freshman year and we had gotten closer, and he was like “I don’t even know who you were freshman year,” and I don’t even think I knew who I was. I feel like coming here, meeting so many different types of people that are so passionate all the time in everything that they do has been so much fun, because it made me realize that I could find something that I was passionate about. It’s just so nice when people just like talk about what they care about, it’s such a nice feeling, you can see it in their eyes how happy it makes them. I think that really changed me and made me be more appreciative about focusing time on things that I actually do care about, investing time in people that I care about. I think that’s what William & Mary has taught me, that it’s okay to spend time with your friends if it means that you are happy at the end of the day, you know? And joining Humans, again, after being at a low my junior year, I felt like I was done changing and growing, and that I had one more year of just like, chilling. Humans showed me once again why William & Mary is the place that it is and why it is so special to a lot of people, because every single person that I’ve interviewed and the people in the organization care so much about making the school a better place, and making this organization more visible through spreading love, and that’s something that’s really important. Talking to people has showed me how much more important that was.

That’s wonderful, and it’s been so nice to work with you, I think I’ve learned a lot from the upperclassmen seeing how you guys have interacted with the organization and how you’ve applied it to yourselves and your lives. So you’ve said that you’ve grown a lot through Humans and through William & Mary in general, so going into the future after graduation, my last question for you is, what is your one wish for the future?

I wish that I will do something that makes me happy, and that I don’t settle for anything less. That’s what I’ve been doing already, but in the future. My family tells me to get a job, whatever that is, that will keep me afloat. What I realized in this whole process is at the end of the day I need to be doing something that makes me happy, that makes me realize what I’m passionate about, something that keeps me on my toes every single day. I need to be excited about doing what I’m doing.

Excited about life.

Yeah, excited about life! I need to be able to wake up in the morning and be like “yes, I’m so excited that I’m going to work today or I’m going to school today,” I want to be happy about everything that I’m doing. I think having this has been a really important part of my life. I don’t need be happy all the time, I think that’s unreasonable, but I need to be like, proud of how far I’ve come and be like “I’ve worked really hard to be here, and at one point this was what I wanted,” and I want to be okay with myself.