take - off ~ 48 Hours
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The missive is a staple of the weekend retreat program, which is designed to help students negotiate the sometimes fraught passage from high school to college life. Program sponsors collect the letters and mail them out months later to remind students of their aspirations in their first months as Boston College students. Rodriguez had voiced hope in the dispatch that he would become more involved in service. And so he had. A premed student, he had recently returned from a service trip to the Dominican Republic. The letter also expressed his desire to continue keeping a journal for self-reflection, another 48 Hours staple. That prompted him to take the journal out of the drawer and resume his daily entries. “It was a grounding moment,” Rodriguez says of receiving the unexpected message from his recent past. Some 1,050 students (roughly half the freshman class) signed up for one of the nine 48 Hours sessions, which are held in November and February of each academic year. Sponsored by the Office of First Year Experience, the purpose of the program—now in its 19th year—is to help freshmen reflect on their new lives at Boston College, away from the cell phones and dormitories, in scenic locations removed from campus. It’s more often referred to as the 48 Hours “experience” than as a retreat. “It’s about transitioning, from who you are at that time to who you want to become,” says Carroll School student Erica Navarro ’13, who attended a November weekend program in Ogunquit, Maine. The experience led her to make a few “restarts,” as Navarro describes it. She resolved, for one, that she would never “close myself off ” to someone experiencing a personal trial.
During each 48 Hours weekend, freshmen hear from a team of 10 seniors who negotiated the same academic and social pressures the freshmen are now facing. Boston College faculty and administrators are also on hand to describe their vocational paths and pursuits. Each senior tells a personal story that steers clear of facile reassurance that everything will be okay. “These are the biggest problems in the world now for these students,” says Kate McAuliffe ’10, a psychology major who helped lead the weekend sessions, “and you don’t want to belittle that.” On Saturday afternoon, the stage is set for the freshmen, who perform skits dramatizing 48 Hours themes such as freedom and responsibility, and friendships and relationships. In the evening, members of the group volunteer for “fishbowls,” stepping up to talk about what they’re going through as fledgling undergraduates. In addition to the journal keeping and letter writing, storytelling is a primary tool of formation at 48 Hours, notes Fr. Joseph P. Marchese, First Year Experience director. In one way or another, the stories seniors and others tell describe a place they have left temporarily, and a new space of freedom that they inhabit, in Chestnut Hill, says Marchese. The freshmen are encouraged to reflect: “What’s my responsibility in this space? What am I called to become?” He says, “It’s a ritual process that’s meant to be transformative” and to cultivate “a new consciousness about what it means to be a student at Boston College, a member of this community.” 5
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