What I'm Taking with Me as a Graduating HDS Student: Kat Woodard

The first time I came to HDS, I fell asleep. I had just taken the 5 AM flight into Boston from D.C., where I was living at the time, and I made it through the doors of Swartz Hall right as HDS Admitted Students Day began. Throughout the day, I sat in the Cader Room hearing one speaker after another share about what makes HDS the unique, pluralistic place that it is, and as the afternoon session began, I could feel my shoulders ever so slowly begin to sink further into the chair behind me and my eyelids start to flutter closed.

By the time Dean David Holland (who would later become my thesis advisor and one of my favorite HDS professors) got up to give a mock lecture, I was out cold. Entirely asleep, in the very front row of an admitted student event for the school I had long dreamed of attending. I wanted to be here so badly, but I was so tired. 

In the short term, the Dramamine I had taken early that morning on the plane certainly wasn’t doing me any favors, and in the longer term, I had spent the past four years of college working three jobs every semester, trying to best prepare my resume for graduate school while doing all I could to make ends meet financially. So, by the time I physically arrived here on the HDS campus, my exhaustion had finally caught up to me, and whether I liked it or not, my body came to rest. 

At the time, I was so disappointed in myself—I wanted to experience all that HDS had to offer, and I was sad to have let even a second of it pass me by. And yet, only now, three years later and exactly two weeks away from my graduation, have I come to realize just how emblematic this experience at Admitted Students Day would be of my experience at HDS writ-large, in more ways than one: 

• Throughout my three years, I had continued to want to experience all that HDS has to offer, and yet, with each semester, I am reminded just how impossible of a task that is. There is so much to do at HDS, and I’ve found that at almost any given moment, there’s at least two different events I’d like to attend that are happening at the same time. HDS students have accomplished a lot, but as far as I’m aware, none of us have successfully mastered teleportation, which means that you, dear future student, like I, will have to choose. We can’t be everywhere at once, and at an institution that offers us so many different, interesting places to be, this requires a good amount of discernment about which spaces are the right spaces for you. For me, those spaces have been Monday afternoon meetings with my fellow United Church of Christ students, where we share communion and conversation, and Tuesday evening Ecstatic Dance in the Multifaith Space, where we share both our best and worst dance moves and, on occasion, a good shout.
• Much like the Cader Room was for me on Admitted Students Day, HDS as a whole has been a place where I have come to rest. This has been true for me both literally, as I’ve been known on occasion to find a good, warm, sunlit corner to curl up for a nap in, and figuratively, as I’ve found myself in a far more reflective headspace during these years surrounded by contemplatives. When I’ve had a difficult day in the library, rewriting the same sentence over and over again because I just can’t get the phrasing right, it’s proven invaluable to be able to walk downstairs and rejuvenate my spirit as I chat with other students in the Commons.  Or, when I’ve long over-extended myself at my field education site and am craving some joy, it’s been so nice to sit under the tall trees just outside Swartz Hall and laugh with my classmates. It’s these small moments of rest and reprieve in community that have sustained me and given me the energy to continue on in the work ahead.
• Lastly, as I grow increasingly closer to my final days at HDS, the phrase “I was so tired, but I wanted to be here so badly” has rung all the more true. Being a full-time graduate student has been exhausting: I have written more papers than I previously imagined I had words in my brain for, I have attended enough club meetings to feel like I had an additional full-time job, and I have met so many of you brilliant, compassionate, curious, and delightfully odd people who have stretched my thinking, nourished my spirit, and become some of my dearest friends. And yet, through the exhaustion, I have wanted to be here so badly, among my fellow classmates, in these conversations, in this sacred, strange, and beautiful little corner of Harvard. 

So, if I had any advice for you all—those of you at the very beginning of your HDS journeys and those of you for whom divinity school is still just a small, but ever-growing twinkle in your eye, it would be this: be here. If you choose HDS to be your academic home, then be all here. Show up to Noon Service and learn about a faith tradition other than your own. Go to Community Tea and stuff yourself with free food. Take a class on something you know absolutely nothing about and let yourself be surprised by your professors, by your classmates, by the texts you read, by your own unfolding voice. You won’t make it to everything, but I promise, you’ll make it to just enough to be changed and formed by your time here. And that will be more than enough to carry with you, wherever you’re headed next.