“The five-year reunion is the only time that you can simultaneously have the college experience — like, a redux of it — while also fully seeing how much things have changed. It’s just a feeling like none other.”
— Karthik Ravishankar ’19
One of Ravishankar’s favorite parts of his reunion was seeing social circles expanding and overlapping as the Class of 2019 reconnected.
“It was really cool because I think this was probably the first time I had seen our class interact across groups,” Ravishankar said. “Inevitably, I think, in every class year, you have different societies, different communities, that will generally congregate in their own groups and social spaces and whatnot. Reunions was the first time I’d ever seen, like, the lacrosse players interacting with the music students, playing Kan Jam or Spikeball or something like that. And it was extraordinarily natural. And for me personally, I really enjoyed seeing that.”
Ravishankar is his class president, a position he did not necessarily leap to take on — he jokes that he was “voluntold” to step into the role. However, he now appreciates the community-building opportunities that naturally arise from leading his class.
It’s really about the connectivity it brings,” Ravishankar said. “Even if I haven’t talked to somebody for a couple of months or a couple of years, and I want to reach back out to them purely just to see how they’re doing, it’s almost like I have a reason to. We just have an anchor and a commonality, so we have a starting point to pick up off of.”
Ravishankar saw at his reunion how those common experiences create bonds that transcend time and past social circles.
“It’s really about the people you went to school with and the experience that you had with those individuals,” Ravishankar said. “It’s about experiencing time with people that were part of a formative period in your life and getting to spend time with them again for 48 or 72 hours. I think that's something that we don't get enough of in our life.”
