I remember my move-in day so distinctly. It was a sunny August morning; my mom’s car was stuffed with furniture and decorations. When we rolled down the window at the staging lot, a worker said, “Welcome to Notre Dame.” It felt like Disney World, with all of the cars, excitement and themed activities. Or maybe more like “Harry Potter” with the castle-esque architecture and intense hall pride (shoutout to my OG castle, Flaherty). 

Regardless of your experience, you are now forever a part of the Notre Dame family. I feel very honored, as editor-in-chief of the student magazine, to give you a warm welcome. In this issue of Scholastic, we’ll highlight the main things to know before coming to campus, as well as some recent updates from this summer.

But before you continue paging through, I want to share some advice: Take advantage of the situation you are in. You are standing at the beginning of a path that can branch off into infinite possible directions. For likely the first time in your life, you have the agency to do whatever you want and be whoever you want. You can finally adopt a nickname, like I did, or make up a complete lie about your backstory that requires you to speak in an Irish accent for the next four years, like my brother’s college friend did.

You’ll have countless academic and extracurricular opportunities. My freshman year, I made an email folder titled “opportunities” to organize all of the inbox-flooding emails I received. To this day, that folder contains 456 emails across 10 sublabels, and I still drop emails into it.

In all honesty, you will enjoy whatever you spend your time doing here. I’ve cherished every schedule-cramming extracurricular, every random core course and spending time with all of the people that have made it worth it; I know you will too. Welcome to Notre Dame!

Much love,

Ellen (Elle) Brouillette