As I’ve watched the Hilltop’s leaves change this year, I’ve been struck by how different they are. The leaves themselves of course have always changed, but now the eyes that watch them have too. Saint Anselm College has changed who I am as a person, and that is what I want to explore here: College as Transformation. Transformation is the goal, though starting out it hardly seems so. As a teenage freshman, I still knew everything. If you’re anything like me, you did (or do) too. I came to college with a certainty about who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. It was all planned out down to a T. Then Saint Anselm College got in the way. Why, though? What makes this school a catalyst for taking what is there within us and making it mean so much more? The answer lies in two halves of her nature: Benedictine and Liberal Arts. Before coming here, the words Liberal Arts meant very little to me, conjuring up only images of stuffy academics and rich white kids sipping coffee and doing nothing with their lives. This could not be further from the truth. The Liberal Arts are about freedom, and the job of a Liberal Arts College is to break the chains students never knew were binding them. It’s not about a freedom to, but rather a freedom from. The Liberal Arts (or, translated differently, the things that free people do) exist to challenge students, to change them. Nothing is more enslaving than thinking that you know everything, or at least having been told that you do. A Liberal education, what Saint A’s exists to provide, is about giving people a language to explain what it is they don’t know; to reframe what passes for knowledge. It’s a far cry from the irrelevant pastime I had been taught to perceive it as. But what does being Benedictine have to do with it? Everything. What makes the Hilltop the Hilltop and not just a hill is the Benedictine way of life. While few of us will become monks, the Rule of Saint Benedict provides a foundation for all of us, as is beautifully put by Prof. Gary Bouchard in the document “Being Benedictine.” The things that make a good monk make a good person. Love, Prayer, Stability, Obedience and Stewardship are not just buzzwords but virtues that when we try to embody them come to change who we are. The Benedictine identity is woven into the fabric of the campus, floating on the breeze. At first many students, myself included, tried to blow it away. Obedience and Stability are after all not very sexy and definitely not what you see on TV. The modern world has little use for these Middle Ages values, ones that we have moved past. I beg you though, breathe them in. It’s like stepping into another world, or at least it was for me. As a freshman, crossing the quad was just a rush from A to B. As a (hopefully) wiser and (definitely) older student that walk is now a deep breath in, a sensation of sunlight and wind, a gift, and a fleeting moment in time. The walk and the moments like it are transformed. That ongoing transformation, the goal of the education we pursue, can be neatly summarized by another Benedictine value: Conversatsio. Conversatsio is that process of aspiring, of growing ourselves to be freer, better people. It’s a value so important that we run a whole class based around it. Very few people like the class Conversatsio while they’re in it. The goal isn’t for us to like it though. It exists to kickstart the much larger Conversatsio of our college careers, and then of our larger life. I walked out of my Conversatsio final relived for it to be over and uncertain of how this was supposed to change me. What I had missed was that it wasn’t over. It never is. Looking at the leaves, that’s what’s different. They change for a reason, and now I do too. Accepting that perpetual Conversatsio has made all the difference.