Library - Heritage Room

Kids Like Me: How I Found Comfort at the Library Printers

Written by Giannina Imperial

Here at Hillsdale, connections between students can sometimes be found in the most unusual places. Case in point: Mossey Library.

I was enrolled in Great Books I during my freshman spring semester. It was the last day of class before exams started and the due date for our final term paper. A procrastinator at the time, I waited until the night before to begin writing my paper—a decision my immune system and I would regret later on. After several hours of typing words, deleting words, and drinking coffee, I jogged to the library the next morning at 7:45 a.m. to print off my finished product, sporting sweatpants and sipping even more coffee.

With four business-quality printers and no printing fee, the library is where most students print off their assignments. Since it was a dismal hour of the morning, and I was under the impression that I was probably one of the more irresponsible students at Hillsdale, I expected to walk into an empty library.

But I was mistaken. I saw six, maybe seven students from my fifteen-student class trying to log into their computers to print off their papers, too. They, too, seemed exhausted, looking about as sunken-eyed and lazily dressed as I was. After seeing my fellow classmates come to class throughout the semester in dresses or blazers, never late and always prepared, it was a change of perspective.

I did not know those students well enough to make any conversation, but we didn’t need to converse. It was enough to exchange glances, see our similar states, and trade simple, subtle smiles in acknowledgment of the struggles we’d separately shared together over the last ten hours.

Silly, seemingly irrelevant, and forgetful experiences like these remind me of this: No matter how intelligent, diligent, responsible, determined, and high caliber Hillsdalians are, they are just kids like me. We miss marks, we forget rehearsals, we receive grades below our expectations, and of course, we procrastinate. But these struggles form a sense of community so strong that even the menial task of printing off our final term papers reminds us that we struggle together.


Giannina ImperialGiannina Imperial, ’18, is a psychology major and biology minor from Jackson, MI. If she isn’t in the Psychology Suite running research participants or in AJ’s immersed in her biology textbooks, you’ll find her in the music hall for one of the dozen rehearsals she’ll have that day.  She loves God, neuroscience, dancing like no one’s watching, getting ice cream with friends, and trying out every Filipino recipe in her mother’s arsenal of cookbooks.