There is a model of Spelman womanhood you can not rush. You can only construct toward it, yr by yr, until the Arch finally acknowledges what you have already become. This yr, that recognition is mine.
I did not select Spelman College by accident. My aunt walked through that same Arch years before I did, and her tales about this place formed me long before I ever set foot on campus. A rising senior from Philadelphia majoring in International Studies, I came here to be formed by a legacy of Black ladies who constructed issues for themselves and each other. I just did not know, until I got here, how long that shaping would take, or how much of it would occur quietly, in rooms no one was watching.
The March Through the Alumnae Arch is one of Spelman’s most sacred traditions. During Commencement Weekend, alumnae and graduating seniors collect on the yard dressed in white, organized class by class, and stroll collectively through the Alumnae Arch in order of seniority, oldest courses first, graduating seniors last. It is the second a pupil formally becomes an alumna, stepping through a construction that generations of Spelman ladies have handed through before her. It sounds easy. It is not. It is the bodily marking of a transformation that has already been occurring for years.
Spelman College Graduates, May 2025. (Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)
I moved into my house for senior yr a few weeks in the past, and something about signing that lease made the complete factor really feel actual in a means that syllabi and transfer in days never fairly have.
This is the yr. Not the yr I arrive, not the yr I am still discovering my footing, but the yr everything I have been quietly building finally comes into full view. The Arch is not actually about the construction itself. It is about what it means to have earned the proper to stroll through it. For 4 years, Spelman ladies transfer around that Arch, previous it, close to it, always conscious of what it represents and always a little too early to claim it. Then spring comes, and something shifts. You are given permission to become totally what you have been working toward the complete time. That is the magnificence of it. It is not handed to you at the begin. It is earned through every abnormal day that came before it, the early mornings, the group initiatives, the sisterhood constructed in dorm hallways and eating corridor conversations, the model of yourself you slowly grew into without fairly noticing.
Becoming does not occur all at once. Nobody wakes up a Spelman lady. You become one in items, in years, through the quiet accumulation of displaying up. I have poured myself into this campus for three years, building a platform that gives college students a actual voice on their own phrases, main a publication that shapes how we inform our own tales, chasing tales that mattered long after the room had emptied out. None of that made me a Spelman lady on its own. But all of it collectively is what the Arch will finally acknowledge in the spring.
This is not just a custom I am strolling toward. It is the legacy I have spent three years creating for myself. I did not inherit a blueprint for what this journey should look like. I constructed one, selection by selection, story by story, until it turned something actual enough to stand on. That is its own type of inheritance, one I get to hand ahead to whoever comes after me, whether that is a future daughter, a niece, or a younger lady on this campus proper now who is building something of her own and wants proof that it can be accomplished.
There is something notably transferring about understanding this yr is not just another yr of faculty. It is the last full cycle of turning into before the second of arrival. Every custom feels completely different now, weighted in a means it never was as an underclassman, because I know where it is main. This senior yr is not preparation. It is the factor I constructed with my own palms, finally coming into view.
(Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images)
What strikes me most is how personal and how communal this feels at once. I will stroll through that Arch alone, on my own steps, in my own second. But I will also be surrounded by ladies who have formed me and been formed by me in return, ladies who know precisely what those years price and what they gave back. That duality, singular and shared, is what makes Spelman womanhood, and the legacy I am building within it, really feel like something value every yr it took to earn.
So, this yr, I am holding onto the in between. The last first day of courses. The last stretch where everything still feels like preparation instead of arrival. Because when spring comes and I finally stroll through that Arch, I need to know I felt every half of the journey that made me prepared for it, and I need to know the legacy ready on the other aspect is one I constructed myself.
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