BY: CASSIDEY KAVATHAS, ADVISORY EDITOR
Photo Courtesy of Cassidey Kavathas
By the time this article is published, I will have 16 days until I graduate from St. Bonaventure University. For the first time, as I plan to leave campus for the summer, my next steps are uncertain. I won’t be moving back in the fall; I have absolutely zero clue where I’ll be come August. That thought is terrifying, but it’s hard to worry about the future when I’m clutching to every single passing second of the present.
Each step around campus and upstairs Murphy Professional Building becomes slower and slower, with each day ticking off the calendar. As I pack my dorm room for one last time, I can’t help but grip onto the memories surrounding my past four years. This week, I saw a TikTok with a quote that said, “My heart is a museum of everyone I’ve ever loved and experienced.” That idea encapsulates my Bonaventure experience.
I’ve led the news show for WSBU 88.3, The BUZZ, since the spring semester of my freshman year. While I was learning how to run the show from then News Director Tom Seipp, he always cued up “California Dreamin ” by The Mama’s and The Papa’s. That song has played for all 250ish news shows since I took over as News Director and the last four shows since passing my directorship to Freshman Payton Searor. On the wavelink of music, “Piano Man” by Billy Joel is Bonaventure to me. As I transition to an alumni, I know that song will transport me back to a packed Burton, swaying with my friends and classmates.
I began working next to Dean Chimbel’s office in Murphy my freshman year. As I sorted through alumni files while adding in new items I couldn’t help but notice the abundance of postcards and letters from alumni sent to Dr. Jandoli or former dean Lee Coppola. When I started my first off-campus internship at Chautauqua Institution, I stood in the bookstore in front of a spinning rack of postcards. Dean Chimbel taped the postcard I sent him from that summer onto the back of the door that leads to his office.
The following summer, I ducked into an airport convenience store fresh off a plane from Dallas to Phoenix, Arizona. I stopped in front of a shelf of postcards, and as I picked a couple out to send later, I indirectly made a tradition.
On my first-ever reporting trip, I stopped at a roadside attraction in New Mexico and paused yet again in front of a rack of postcards. I sent notes to everyone from Bonaventure who impacted me and guided me to end up on the side of the road as my team drove to Hobbs, New Mexico. My career and who I am was and is indirectly molded by my professors and peers at Bonaventure. I wouldn’t be as successful without their push.
I joined St Bonaventure’s Dance Team in the fall of my junior year when I realized writing had consumed every aspect of my Bona’s experience. While it was not in a bad way, Dr. Wilkins called me out, exclaiming that I needed to get a hobby. So there I was in a sweaty Butler basement on a humid August afternoon, dancing for the first time since my senior year of high school. As I’m writing this, my last performance is tonight. I don’t think I could watch a Pitch Perfect movie without thinking of our group stretches on the Quick Center stage before the doors open.
This collection of moments are only a glimpse into the little things that have shaped me at Bonaventure. I still think of my old roommate and friend group when I hear a Nicki Minaj song or a professor when I see a theater reference or even something as small as a picture of a cat doing something silly. I am a collage of the memories I’ve built in the last four years.
My Bonaventure experience will continue to live on around campus through the little quirks I’ve passed on to the students who come after me. For I hope to live on in their hearts as much as everyone I’ve experienced at Bona’s lives in mine.
kavathcj20@bonaventure.edu
