Walking with purpose, area girl Liz Vandertramp, ’18, hurried toward her campus commons to grab a front-row seat at the sponsored community civic engagement panel. Notepad and pen in hand, she sat ready to capture the first question once the Q&A session commenced.
The situation suddenly took a drastic turn, though, as the conversation between the panel’s experts sparked a very tangential anecdote in Vandertramp’s mind. Nearly bursting at the seams at the mention of the administration’s response to income inequality on campus, she finally blurted out:
“But it’s different in Spain!”
The room hushed. Darting glances filled the room, furiously searching for the origin of the screech. Unasked, Vandertramp took the opportunity to help clarify, standing on her seat and starting to speak with conviction.
“Like, when my eight sorority sisters and I studied abroad in Barcelona last semester, we totally encountered this problem,” she said to the panel of confused moderators.
“Yeah, so, we saw so many hobos on the streets, and we were bummed for them because, like, we were drinking all day, and they couldn’t… do they not know we are in Europe?”
(To her shock, Vandertramp triggered half the audience by using the phrase “hobo” instead of “person of lower socioeconomic person.” Alas, she continued.)
“We decided, to reach into our Barbours and all pitched into together to get this man a bottle of vodka. Like, it would have been so selfish of us to not spread the party culture that we were living… and I think we all learned a lot that day because of it.”
Before the moderators had a chance to address this statement, and get the conversation back on track, Vandertramp realized it was a throwback Thursday, and she was about to miss prime Instagram posting time of a photo of her friends solving homelessness across Spain. Exiting as quickly as she came, Vandertramp has allegedly been prefacing class discussions with her experience in Spain ever since.
-Andrew Donchez ‘17
The Radish 