senior thesis
It Will Always Be There
The Future of Our Family
Everyone in RHP is very realistic about the future of the group. Once we graduate, we will be going to graduate school, medical school, work, or travel across the country and around the world. Perhaps because the group has continued to exist in people’s imaginations, almost everyone made a similar statement to this one:
“I still feel like, in a year, I could call up anybody and be like, ‘hey, I’m coming to your city and I need a place to stay...’ And it would be cool. So it’s never going to completely go away. I’ll always be friends with everybody in that group... I think it’ll be that way in a year. And I think it’ll be that way in five years. And I think even if I didn’t see some people for ten years, and they called me up ten years from now I would still [help] them. I think we are still a really close group, it’s just a lot more subtle now than it was before”
In a similar way to a “real” family, this group “doesn’t need constant contact” to feel close. Most RHPers hope to keep in touch and see others when they can. But we all “understand we have other things we need to do.”
“What will probably happen is that people will get wrapped up in what they’re doing, and communicate once in awhile. And once in awhile we’ll manage to see each other, probably in smaller groups and not all at once... I can think of things like, maybe Caroline and Richard getting married, would be one of those points of coming back and things moving to a different level.”
Besides hopes for occasional communication, there is a sense of excitement mingled with a sense of sadness about the future. On the one hand, we will all be scattered and the intense experiences of freshman year will never come again. On the other hand, we have the privilege to call an extraordinary group of people our friends and follow their achievements and lives over the next many years.