By: Kevyn Price
Bellarmine Campus Ministry held a first-year retreat on April 10. The event was in-person and gave Bellarmine first-year students the opportunity to connect with other first-year students through a day of reflection, discussion and activities.
Director of Campus Ministry Laura Kline said the retreat usually is in the fall and it is an overnight retreat. Kline said she was not sure if it was too late to do the retreat in the spring, so she reached out to some first-year students for their thoughts and several of them said they wanted the retreat.
“Because of Covid, they had not had the opportunity to make those really deep connections because they were holed up in a room taking classes and everything else, so they still are craving some of that connection, Kline said, “I think that seems to be the guiding thrust of why most of these students want to be on a retreat. It’s not that they are necessarily seeking a deeper relationship with God or anything explicitly religious, I just think that they are looking for connections with each other.”
Kline planned various activities for the participants, such as going to the Speed Art Museum, journaling and creating artwork. After meditating on the paintings, the participants joined a group discussion and reflected on the fears they had when starting college, hopes they had when starting college and what they learned about themselves.
First-year student Esha Khan said she enjoyed the retreat because of the group discussion about experiences and feelings of the first year of college. Khan said that these discussions helped her realized that a lot of people share her feelings.
“When we started talking about that and how everyone has kind of adapted and assimilated to this new environment, I felt a little less like I’m not the only one going through that and I’m not the only one here like ‘What the heck is going on?’ From the outside looking in, it seems like everyone is fine and everyone is doing their own thing. If you look at it from on the inside, everyone is just a little scared,” Khan said.
After the discussion, the participants created their own artwork to reflect on their first year and to relax. Students created artwork that meant something to them.
First-year student Sophie Wesseler said that she enjoyed connecting with other students through the discussion and art.
“We got to really connect over some of our shared experiences that we had as first-years like during a pandemic and coming out of lockdown. Doing the art was also a connecting experience because we were all making something that meant something to us, but together, so that was really nice,” Wesseler said.