Cultural – Aran Sheehan

My home is a 24 hour flight from my College.

As I stood at the International departures gate, watching my mother turn around to walk back to the car, I realized I was terrified. Every memory I had was from Singapore, my home for the last 18 years. My friends, my family, all my favorite restaurants – everything I knew was in this city state half the size of Rhode Island.

It had been a long time since I’d had to make friends. In High School, all my friends had been there since elementary school. Now, I knew nobody, and I felt very isolated. I had just arrived on campus, and was already being shoved into international student orientation. Though nervousness plagued my system, I knew I had to make new friends. This led to my taking every possible opportunity to meet new people. While waiting in line to get my student ID card, I started talking with another new student. At lunch, I asked to join a table of people I didn’t know. I attended night time activities such as painting and karaoke, all in the hopes of making connections. Every interaction became easier to initiate, every conversation flowing better than the last. Throughout international orientation, I had countless conversations with complete strangers, and to this day I still am close with many of these friends.

Transitioning to life in the US was also about experiencing a new culture, new traditions, new foods, new weathers. Everything was new, and for the first couple days, I was biased against it, constantly comparing it to Singapore. However, connecting with such a variety of students throughout orientation showed me the beauty of different cultures, and how appreciating and engaging with many cultures can greatly expand your knowledge of the world. I learned about the shared experiences of myself and a student from Hong Kong, sang Hindi karaoke songs, played soccer with students from Switzerland, India, Oman, France, and met my roommate from the US.

Though it was very difficult leaving my home to travel to the other side of the globe for college, it was an invaluable experience, teaching me how to connect with strangers and appreciate a variety of cultures.

Getting COVID helped me make friends.

After four years of High School shaped by COVID-19, I was prepared for College to be a new, wonderful experience. No more zoom school, no more quarantine, no more masks. Yet, during my very first week at Wesleyan, I contracted COVID, and was instructed to isolate myself for a week.

A saving grace came in the form of my RA, Tyler. He would come talk to me through my door, and play iMessage games with me, making me feel that I was still a part of the world outside my door. Tyler’s kindness showed me that college was all about connection. He was looking for a friend just as much as I was.

However, when I was released from quarantine, I found that most people had already made friends. I had missed out on orientation, where you are all forced to be in the same group and spend hours each day together. This was a perfect location for friendships to form, and I would now have to make friends with random people who I’d never met, and who had no reason to be around me. I attended films by myself, went on midnight swims in nearby ponds, and joined a variety of clubs in hopes I would make connections. All of these activities were outside of my comfort zone, but some of them became regular occurrences in my life. I made friends and memories at each activity, something that would’ve never occurred had I not contracted COVID for the fourth time. Despite it being such a burden to me throughout my life, for the first time COVID added something to my life: resilience and confidence.

Why I wear a Coin around my Neck.

Throughout my life, I have collected as many unique, beautiful, and interesting coins as I could find. As a boy growing up in Singapore, I had the chance to obtain coins from neighboring countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and even countries as far as Australia and Japan. When I was young, the most interesting part of these coins was the designs, the weight, the color. Now, I enjoy learning about and displaying these coins just as much.

My passion for coin collecting has led to other passions, such as making necklaces out of the coins, or refurbishing until they shine like new. During my freshman year, I made a coin necklace out of a US half dollar that my grandfather gave me. This necklace had both symbolic meaning to me, and historic meaning. The half dollar coin was one of the first I researched about when my passion for coins led to learning about their history. This coin was used in circulation in the US for over 200 years, and initially was made partially with pure silver. Often, it was worth more at the time to melt the coin and sell the silver. However, nowadays the silver half dollar coins are worth far more than the silver, showing how the passage of time can add value to items who’s component parts are not valuable in themselves. This necklace represents family to me, as it was given to me by my grandfather, but also represents my love for coins and their histories, as it was one of the first coins I researched.

Studying the history of coins has led me to some interesting conclusions about the human tendency to find value in random organic items. When coins were first being used, they had value because they were a specific amount of valuable resources. In other words, people would know how much of whatever important metal was in the coin, and that would determine the value. Oftentimes, they would shave parts of the coin off, and after enough coins, would have a significant amount of shaving to sell. This led to coins having ridges on the rim. In countries with this feature, coins without the ridges are not accepted as legal tender. However, as time passed, the valuable metals were switched for copper, brass, and other cheaper and easier to find metals. Yet the value remained in the coins, despite their physical components being worth much less than their perceived value.

The collection of coins led me to learning about the history of coins, and learning about the history only strengthened my love of collection. Learning does not only have to be forced and uninteresting, it can also inform you about your hobbies, and increase your love for these hobbies.