I return for my penultimate BMC Culture Series post!

Today we will be considering two interesting peculiarities: Hour-long dinner and the Bryn Mawr Chop.

Hour-long dinner was a source of constant annoyance for me as a first-year. I worked in the dining hall and always wished those Mawrters at that table would just kahfiyeh! (Liberian-English for get lost). But no, they would sit there, giggling and chortling until well after closing. Now that I have an alumna friend, I understand better (though she and I have hour-long lunches). For undergraduates, it’s quite simply that they have so little time else to see each other–you gotta take what you can get.

For example, I have one friend at whom I constantly marvel. Had I not decided to be unexpectedly outgoing my first day at BMC, she and I would never have known each other. She’s an English major…I haven’t taken an English class since my first semester. We aren’t in any of the same clubs or groups, either. Thus, dinners and the odd meeting are the only times we can meet up.

The Bryn Mawr Chop is a force: all the “cool kids” do it. Mostly it happens after your first semester on the Mawr. I got mine not because I necessarily wanted short hair, but because I was tired of continuing to straighten my own hair. Pretty much whenever you return from a break, there will be buckets of people who have lopped off their locks or shaved their heads. It really fun to see all the crazy styles people come back with.

Next time on the Culture Series: We’ll discuss the boons gifted to us through the Honor Code and Self-Governance!