FEATURES

tuftsdaily.com THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

Seniors share college wisdom with first-years

by Jillian Collins

Executive Features Editor

Your new white sneakers are demolished from orientation week floors, the pre-orientation group chat is no longer active and you now have a take on the Carm vs. Dewick debate. Now what? Classes are starting and the daunting feeling of four years at Tufts might be creeping up on you. No need to fret; every Tufts student has been there.

Listen to these seniors as they reflect on their first year at Tufts and give advice on how first-years can make the most of their first few months of college.

“I think that first-years should focus on getting out of their comfort zone and not just doing the same things that they did in high school,” Steph Waugh, a political science student, said. “Those have been the most impactful experiences from my Tufts career.”

For international relations student Briana McGowan, it was as simple as changing the language she took when getting to college.

“[In high school,] I took French, and then when I came to college, I was like, ‘I want to challenge myself, and I want to try something new,’ so then I just took Arabic kind of out of nowhere,” McGowan said. “Now I’m minoring in Arabic and now my career’s oriented towards the Middle East.”

Changing things up from high school can also take the form of joining a new activity.

“The first GIM I went to was the ballroom dancing GIM, which I just went to on a whim … I did not dance before at all,” Waugh said. “I really just loved the atmosphere. There was an immediate click, and the seniors were so welcoming, and that has become my main thing at Tufts. All because I decided to go to a random GIM, you know, the first week of school.”

At the same time, during the first semester, it is just as important that firstyears prioritize their mental health. René LaPointe Jameson, an environmental engineering student, noted that it is the difference between surviving and thriving in the first semester of college.

“You can only engage, learn, and adjust to college as well as you are feeling internally. If you make sure to prioritize your well-being with plenty of rest and time for the things you love you will not just survive the first semester but thrive,” Jameson wrote in an email to the Daily.

With classes starting and new deadlines approaching, it is easy for first-years to find themselves centering their lives around academics. Although important, academics do not need to be the main priority. For community health major Ann Christelle Labossiere, changing how she approached school was a learning curve in her first year.

“I’m not subscribing to the idea that I need to constantly be up late just doing work … that’s actually not even healthy, so I started to realize I was pushing myself a bit too hard a few months into freshman year,” Labossiere said.

While easier said than done, taking time for self-care pays off. However, for the moments when first-years do find themselves lost in the depths of the Canvas class page, they should know there are other resources.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help, and the same thing goes for academics. Your professors are there to teach you and to support you, so going to their office hours and admitting that you don’t know how to do something, or you don’t understand something — that’s what they’re there for … to help you,” McGowan said.

A common struggle for many first-year students is the intimidation factor of college. At the start, it can be very easy for students to feel as if they do not belong in this new learning environment.

“Imposter syndrome is real, sometimes, especially for, maybe, first-gen and low-income students. And so just kind of [remind] yourself, like, you have a space here,” Labossiere said.

Especially since Tufts is a predominantly white institution, students of color may feel marginalized academically and socially. Jameson reiterated the statement that all students should feel like they deserve to be at school like Tufts.

“To my fellow Black jumbos, remember you belong. You have a place here, you earned your spot in your class, and you are exceptional. Also, come by the Africana Center!” Jameson wrote.

As a school that has an undergraduate student population of nearly 6,000, it can be a difficult place to navigate compared to smaller high school classrooms. For Labossiere, getting used to the size took some time.

“My graduating class in high school was 45 students; we were a very small charter school in Boston,” Labossiere said. “So when I came to Tufts, I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness this school is so big. I’m not going to know nobody. It is going to be really hard for me to like meet new people.’”

While at first Tufts may feel overwhelming, there are ways to make this midsize school small. For Labossiere, connecting with the identity centers allowed her to find a sense of community.

“I think [first-years] should focus on making themselves aware of all the resources on campus that are beneficial to them and their experiences here. I think there’s a lot of things I ended up learning like, ‘Oh, this support system through the FIRST Center,’ or ‘the support system in the Africana Center can actually help me,’” Labossiere said. “I didn’t know until, like, maybe my sophomore or junior year.”

Community can also be felt by the people you see all over campus, such as in the dining hall workers.

“The Tufts Dining workers helped me get through my first year. Dining worker friends (shout out especially to Freddy and Tony) have always looked out for me and checked in on me when I got meals,” Jameson wrote. “Our dining workers work so hard and nourish us both physically with the food they serve and emotionally with their kindness. Please make sure to thank them!”

In the first few months of college, making friends is no easy task. Every day, first-years meet more and more people, and at some point it becomes impossible to remember all the names. Waugh remembers this feeling when they came to Tufts.

“It was hard to tell who was being real with me and [who was] putting on this facade to try to make new friends … I think it was like the second semester when it started to become really obvious who actually enjoyed hanging out with me,” Waugh said. “I guess some advice for first-years would be don’t feel the pressure to make your solid group of friends at O-week or during the beginning of school because it’s okay and probably better if it molds and changes throughout the first couple years.”

The most powerful support system can also be just finding that one person, so firstyears should not feel pressure to find a group.

Waugh said, “I think finding at least one person that you can actually be real with was pretty helpful for me, so when I did have a breakdown or something, I had someone to talk to about it, [and it] wasn’t just all in my head.”

At the end of college, students may not remember the day they studied all day for that calculus midterm, but they will remember the time they got lost on the T for the first time. Seniors encourage first-years to make time for fun this year.

“I wish I spent more time exploring Boston. For some reason, I always thought if I’m going into Boston, I have to set a day aside. But it’s not that far or serious to go. Just go and explore,” Jameson wrote.

College is extremely different from high school, which is both exciting and terrifying. First-years should take these next four years to let themselves make mistakes, learn from them and just enjoy their time.

“[There’s a] high school mentality of like ‘grades are everything,’ and you know, ‘I have to have this specific group of friends.’ College really isn’t like that. You can kind of have the space and room to experiment and to mess up, and there are a lot of support systems around to help you when that does happen,” Waugh said. “I think it’s so important for people to make mistakes and not be perfect in an environment that is so supportive, so that later on when it happens inevitably in the rest of life, it’s not a jarring experience.”

BY CECILIA OROZCO

Conversations on camp with Jo Michael Rezes

by Keira Myles

Staff Writer

Jo Michael Rezes’ existence rests in camp, the concept first established by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp'” as an aesthetic absurdity that is artificial, passionate, serious; easy to see but hard to explain; and includes the seemingly unconnected examples of Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake and women’s clothes of the 1920s. As a Tufts Theatre and Performance Studies Ph.D. student and an ardent devotee of queer temporalities in camp, Rezes is instructing the new Experimental College course, “Camp: Bad Taste, Humor, and Cult Classics” this fall.

In 1964, Susan Sontag defined camp as an aesthetic “sensibility” that is plain to see but hard for most of us to explain: an intentional over-the-top-ness, a slightly (or extremely) “off” quality, bad taste as a vehicle for good art.

As an undergraduate, they navigated their own identity through art and scholarship while studying English and drama — concentrating in queer studies and stage direction. Embodying varying gender expressions, they sensed a shift in the movement of time, inspiring their scholarship onward.

“I started noticing that when I was taking on a character that was exploring gender or was actively a trans character,” Rezes said. “I was noticing moments in rehearsals and I was noticing moments in collaborative settings where time moved differently or felt like it moved differently in my body.”

Embodiment and movement altered their temporalities for Rezes while playing Seymour Krelborn in Little Shop of Horrors as an undergraduate. This role was a powerful discovery.

“Oh, I can play a man, but I don’t think I am a man. So that’s when a trans discovery happened. This queer moment happened for me, but also, it was fully imbricated in this Camp sensibility … Camp, gender, queerness are all wrapped up in this body

CAMP

continued from page 3 and everyone’s body, and it was just very exciting,” Rezes said.

Rezes explored notions of time, embodiment, camp, gender and queerness in their master’s thesis at Tufts titled, “Phantacamp: Queer Temporal Ruptures in the Performance of Restaged Camp.” After their thesis, they were inspired to design a syllabus teaching the unteachable and undefinable: camp. It just so happened the utter failure of the so-called “Camp”-themed 2019 Met Gala simultaneously occurred as they finished their thesis, further inspiring them to dive into the complexities of camp and its influence spanning varying media. In fact, one week in the course will be dedicated to focusing on the 2019 Met Gala, discussing the absurdity of watching celebrities attempt camp.

“I think there’s something about the Met Gala in 2019 and watching celebrities try to embody a sensibility that is inherently a minority area and trying to say, ‘I am the camp-est of the camp,’” they said. “But meanwhile, having nine mansions and having to navigate the world as a rich celebrity may not be the best entry way for a camp moment or camp commentary.”

Rezes’ course will hone on the intricacies and nuances of camp and its historical development that the 2019 Met Gala failed to assess, particularly in regards to class and race.

“We’re going to be making sure that we dedicate more of the course to understanding camp as a black cultural aesthetic than one that might have been represented at the Met Gala in 2019,” Rezes said.

The course’s camp sensibilities are exposed through media, internet, and scholarship outlets, challenging students to question camp’s changing artistic and historical expressions over time. Rezes’ selections include Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp”; Christopher Isherwood’s first commentary on camp as a concept; the seventh season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” (2009–); “The Dark Side of Camp Aesthetics” (2017); “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (1986–1990); “Notes on the Uses of Black Camp” (2017); films by John Waters; “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975); and commentaries concerning horror, camp and actual summer camp.

In the final weeks, Rezes will examine their dissertation scholarship on HIV and AIDS history and performance, exploring themes of the haunting and dark sides of camp. Rezes’ thesis work focuses on camp existing as a recycling practice that repurposes things that hurt in society by turning them into something beautiful. This was an idea proposed by José Esteban Muñoz in his book “Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics” (1999).

“As I developed my dissertation project on sweetness and the performance of HIV and AIDS, I was thinking about camp as innocence and sincerity and then the literalness of sweetness in these performances by those living with HIV and AIDS from the onset of the epidemic in the 1980s, at least from a US context, and seeing how sweetness manifested in that digital archive and paper trail archive of those living with HIV and AIDs,” Rezes said.

According to Rezes, the camp sensibility became a way for community members to communicate about safety and health amidst an oppressive government system.

“Camp became a language of sorts to communicate ideas across difference,” they said.

Rezes analyzes sweetness as understanding one’s sense of taste and what constitutes aesthetic “good” or “bad” taste, in addition to a literal sweetness masking the pain underneath campy appearances.

“In the dark side of camp aesthetics and a lot of contemporary camp scholarship we see camp as this artifice on top and underneath something a little bit more horrific and a little bit shadowy and just terrifying underneath. Camp is this artifice on top of something that actually hurts, that is actually sometimes violent,” Rezes said. “[It] feels excessive, but underneath is something much more sinister.”

Rezes also looks at sweetness in camp as a modality for connection and as a form of confident protest defying deep suffering.

“Sweetness can be two people holding each other during a protest action and defying expectations of the media … but a protest could just be a kiss in public… sweetness as in wearing a very flashy outfit when you’re going out despite feeling like the world is against you … sweetness is a calling card for a lot of different things,” they said.

Beyond analyzing camp as a social LGBTQ embodiment, Rezes will host their students as campers at an imagined summer camp. The course’s syllabus replicates a camp itinerary, to play on both queer campiness while simulating a summer camp culture. They emphasized the importance of the community and camaraderie intertwined within the course’ material and structuring.

“I think we’re very hungry during this pandemic moment for connection and intimacy and all of this cult classic media, all of this campy material is very, very close,” Rezes said. “It’s about taste. It’s about touch. It’s about sensation.”

Rezes is prioritizing collective learning in their classroom.

“We’re all engaged with creating the space equally and together, and I am not in control of anything or any of the ideas in the space necessarily,” they said.

The collective and creative camaraderie presents itself in the course’s assignments, including many performance projects like having students embody characters from reality TV scenes, filming a ‘50s/’60s/’70s/’80s aesthetic sex-ed PSA announcement, and performing the entirety of the film floor show “Rocky Horror.”

The final “Rocky Horror” floor show assignment connects powerfully to Rezes’ past, as they performed in “The Rocky Horror Show” as Brad Majors and FrankN-Furter. Expressing and playing with gender stereotypes with full force in both characters paved the way for their personal arc and growth in identity.

“I think it was just a full circle moment of my time as an artist and a scholar coming together and colliding where I said I am researching as I am developing this character and embodying this iconic figure,” Rezes said. “It was just full circle. It just felt like: ‘Oh, I have come into my own as this trans artist scholar at that moment.'”

COURTESY JO MICHAEL REZES Jo Michael Rezes is pursuing their Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies at Tufts while teaching a class in the Experimental College this semester.