Athena Ye - Story of Self
My strong urge to be surrounded by a community, though, is not surprising to me. The formative years of my childhood took place in Sycamore, IL, a rural farm town about an hour and a half west of Chicago. Although I didn’t look like almost any of my peers, their support for me and all the other children in our town was undeniable.
However, when I committed to Harvard for swimming, I was worried about leaving my tight-knit community behind. Everyone told me that I would find another community, or better yet, even more communities at Harvard, but I still doubted them.
It wasn’t until I was welcomed in during First-Year Move-In Day that I saw how exciting college could be. I was immediately greeted by PAFs and the Crimson Key Society helping me move into my dorm. I was in awe of them. Not only did they help my family and me during an extremely stressful day, but they made me feel welcomed and seen, even just from the short interactions I had with them.
Then, at the extracurriculars fair I saw just how many communities there were to join on campus. It was like I was a toddler in a candy factory. From connecting with my Asian identity through the Asian American Association to exploring my future career path with the Harvard Pre-Medical Society, I fully realized how many communities I could hold close to my heart.
I made the classic mistake of over-enrolling in all of the extracurriculars that I was interested in. However, by the end of my freshman year, after we were kicked off of campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my long list of extracurriculars became a very short, or more accurately, a less long one.
One of the extracurriculars on this “less long” list that stole my heart was the Crimson Key Society. Continue onto the Story of Us to learn more about this organization and my relationship with it.
