by Danielle Dawson

On a warm afternoon in late April 2018, a high school senior and her mom drove to Sweet Briar College, a small women’s college in rural Virginia, for a tour. Danielle had lived in Virginia her entire life, but she discovered the college after searching online for schools close to her home. She loved everything the college website advertised and quickly sent in an application.
When Danielle and her mom arrived, they were warmly welcomed by many faculty members and students and then taken on a tour. Since she is a dancer, Danielle asked to see the dance facilities. She and her mom watched the start of a contemporary class that was in session, while they waited for another professor to arrive. Ella Magruder was teaching the class and her husband, Mark Magruder, was available to take Danielle and her mother through the building. When Mark arrived, he was very excited to give her a full tour of the dance studio. The tour was fascinating to Danielle, because the studio was bigger than her studio back home, and everyone seemed so professional. One detail, in particular, stood out to Danielle: the dance studios stayed open all day and all night. Danielle was amazed, imagining using the studios during her free time to keep up her technique and to just have fun.

Fast forward a few months. Danielle graduated high school and danced her senior solo in her dance academy’s annual recital. August 17 was move-in day for Sweet Briar College. The week that followed was a whirlwind of activities that made up orientation. It was a week that Danielle says she can barely remember now. The activities included many meetings on how to navigate college life, on the college’s many traditions such as the Daisy Ceremony, which is how the first-year students are welcomed into the college, and memorizing the College’s honor code. After a while, having to do so many things while trying to adjust to college life became overwhelming, and Danielle just did not feel like herself. She had fun, but she eventually started to feel tired and homesick. A three-week class began immediately after orientation. Danielle, along with all the other first-year students, took a class on design thinking, the process of breaking down a problem into simple pieces and then finding a solution. While the class was not hard, she felt at first as if she was stuck with a group of people who didn’t want to do the work. Even after the group constituents changed, and she was in a new configuration of people with whom she quickly became friends, Danielle still felt overwhelmed.

One weekend, Danielle had to stay on campus instead of going home, because of activities that included her design thinking group going to an event in downtown Lynchburg to interview strangers for a project. On Saturday, Danielle texted her frustrations to her mom. She felt homesick, and she missed her family and pets, but she was also missing her old dance studio and friends, because this was the week she would have gone back to dance classes. Her mom texted back: “Why don’t you see if the dance studio is open today?” Danielle pondered this for a moment and then threw on her dance clothes, grabbed her bag of dance shoes and her choreography notebook, and headed out the door. She stepped into the building, despite feeling hesitant, and looked around. No lights were on, and the weather was gloomy. She walked down the hallway and went down the stairs to the practice studio rooms. The moment Danielle stepped into the studio, she took a deep breath. And then she smiled.   The studio room was a change of scenery from the classroom and dorm that she had been spending most of her time in. She felt herself relax as she took in the mirrors, the wood floors, and the view of trees outside the windows. Danielle took off her sneakers and stretched and danced until she could hardly breathe. As she sat down to cool off and drink some water, she started laughing. Why hadn’t she done this before? she wondered.

Danielle has been dancing since she was two years old, so it’s no wonder that dance is an automatic stress reliever. She had put both her physical and mental health on the back burner, while trying to get through the first weeks of college, and the stress had quickly caught up to her.

Now, Danielle realized how important it is to stay healthy and not overwork herself. Danielle still loves walking to the studio in the fall weather while watching the many birds and squirrels that live around campus. When she gets to the studio, she no longer hesitates but walks in with a smile. Danielle goes through a series of stretches that she learned at her old studio and then choreographs new dances just for fun. Through doing what she loves, Danielle can finally enjoy her time at Sweet Briar College.