There’s a version of Spelman femininity that you can’t rush. You can only build toward this goal, year after year, until the Ark finally recognizes what you have already become. This year, this recognition belongs to me.
I didn’t choose Spelman College by chance. My aunt walked through this same Arch years before me, and her stories about this place shaped me long before I ever set foot on campus. A graduate of Philadelphia in international studies, I came here to be shaped by a legacy of black women who built things for themselves and each other. Until I arrived, I just didn’t know how long this training would take, or to what extent it would happen quietly, in rooms that no one was watching.
Walking through the Alumnae Arch is one of Spelman’s most sacred traditions. During graduation weekend, alumni and graduating seniors gather in the courtyard dressed in white, organized class by class, and walk together through the Alumni Arch in order of seniority, oldest classes first, graduating seniors last. This is the moment when a student officially becomes an alumna, breaking through a structure that generations of Spelman women have passed through before her. It seems simple. It’s not. It is the physical marking of a transformation that has already been taking place for years.
I moved into my apartment for my senior year a few weeks ago, and something about signing that lease made it real in a way that programs and moving never really did.
This is the year. Not the year I arrived, not the year I still find my place, but the year where everything I’ve been quietly building finally comes into full view. The Ark isn’t really about the structure itself. It’s about what it means to have earned the right to cross it. For four years, the Spelman women moved around this Arch, passing it, approaching it, always aware of what it represented and always a little too early to seize it. Then spring comes and something changes. You have permission to fully become what you have worked for all this time. That’s all its beauty. It is not given to you at the start. It is earned through each ordinary day that preceded it, the early mornings, the group projects, the brotherhood built in the dorm hallways and the conversations in the dining hall, the version of yourself that you slowly grew into without really realizing it.
Becoming does not happen all at once. Nobody wakes up a Spelman woman. You become one in pieces, over the years, through the quiet accumulation of your appearances. I’ve been invested on this campus for three years, building a platform that gives students a real voice on their own terms, leading a publication that shapes the way we tell our own stories, seeking out the stories that mattered long after the room has emptied. None of this alone made me a Spelman woman. But it is all of this together that the Ark will finally recognize in the spring.
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It’s not just a tradition I walk towards. This is the legacy I spent three years creating for myself. I didn’t inherit a plan for what this journey should look like. I built one, choice by choice, story by story, until it became something real enough that we could rely on. That’s its own kind of legacy, one that I can pass on to anyone who comes after me, whether it’s a future daughter, a niece, or a young woman on this campus right now who is building something of her own and needs proof that it can be done.
There’s something particularly poignant about knowing that this year isn’t just another year of college. It is the last complete cycle of becoming before the moment of arrival. Each tradition feels different now, weighted in a way it never was as an underclass, because I know where it leads. This last year is not preparation. This is the thing I built with my own hands that is finally appearing.
What strikes me most is how both personal and communal it feels. I will cross this Arch alone, on my own steps, at my own pace. But I will also be surrounded by women who shaped me and were shaped by me in return, women who know exactly what those years cost and what they gave back. This duality, singular and shared, is what makes Spelman’s womanhood, and the legacy I’m building there, seem like something worth every year it took to earn.
So this year I’m hanging on to the in-between. The last first day of classes. The final stretch where everything still looks like a preparation rather than an arrival. Because when spring comes and I finally walk through that Arch, I want to know that I felt every step of the journey that prepared me to get there, and I want to know that the legacy waiting for me on the other side is one that I built for myself.