Eliza Hernandez (she/her) was the Projects Editor forThe Heightsin 2023. In 2022, she served as Editorial Assistant and Associate Opinions Editor. She is from Santa Clarita, Calif. You can contact her ateliza.hernandez@bcheights.com.
The autumn bustle of Boston College students this year is shadowed by the upcoming U.S. presidential election. With November quickly approaching, the student body is tasked with finding its role in the next chapter of American history, walking the line between abstraction, activism, and apathy.
“Keep talking,” Landrigan said. “Keep impressing on the elders the importance of the issue. The fact that your generation is going to have to live with [climate change] for a lot longer than we do. And keep making the argument that climate change has to be taken seriously, especially in a Jesuit Catholic University.”
“Sustainability is going to be so important going forward,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t matter what your career interest is, or, you know, your individual interests—It’s going to apply to so many different disciplines, so I think it’s important for students to view it as something they should be paying attention to and being proactive about.”
“We also remind the students that they’re moving into a community—a hard working community where people are,” Boyle said. “It’s not college life. You know, it’s not the Mods.”
“I never felt like the stigma of ‘Oh, they’re going to try to make me Catholic,’ which I think is good,” Bail said. “I’m still Hindu and confident in my own beliefs, but I’ve also been able to engage in Christianity while sharing that Hindu part of myself as well with others.”
“I just felt a little, you know, disappointed that sadly, now a reality is going to be that now there might be even less of a population of students who look like me or come from similar backgrounds as me,” Beato said. “And there’s going to be even less of a population of that in schools that are already predominantly white.”
Like many Boston College seniors hoping to take full advantage of their remaining days on the Heights, Kristen Donnelly said she and her friends have a bucket list to tackle before graduation. This bucket list, Donnelly explained, is particularly important to her because the COVID-19 pandemic prevented her from doing many of the activities and…
Enclosed in an ornate golden frame on the walls of the McMullen Museum is a painting of the Madonna and Child alongside John the Baptist that Stephanie Leone said she and her students found particularly intriguing.
Like many of its peer institutions, Boston College considers “legacy status” in first-year admissions, according to Grant Gosselin, director of undergraduate admission. But, BC is the only university in the Greater Boston area, however, to omit its consideration of students’ alumni relations—granted to students with family who have attended or currently are attending the University—in its 2021–2022 Common Data Set.
“As support for Black students and other students of color have been essential to their success, so too has support for Black faculty, staff, and administrators,” Johnson said. “Our anniversary is a testament of our commitment to not only the Heights community, but also to one another’s success.”
